ice, the sacrifice of self for others' good. The lesson was slowly
learned, but every hint of it went to my heart, and I kept in silent
upon my window wall reminders like that of holy George Herbert:--

"Be useful where thou livest, that they may
Both want and wish thy pleasing presence still.
--Find out men's wants and will,
And meet them there. All worldly joys go less
To the one joy of doing kindnesses;"

and that well-known passage from Talfourd,--

"The blessings which the weak and poor can scatter,
Have their own season.
It is a little thing to speak a phase
Of common comfort, which, by daily use,
Has almost lost its sense; yet on the ear
Of him who thought to die unmourned 't will fall
Like choicest music."

A very familiar extract from Carlos Wilcox, almost the only quotation
made nowadays from his poems, was often on my sister Emilie's lips,
whose heart seemed always to be saying to itself:--

"Pour blessings round thee like a shower of gold!"

I had that beside me, too, and I copy part of it here, for her sake,
and because it will be good for my girl readers to keep in mind one of
the noblest utterances of an almost forgotten American poet:--

"Rouse to some work of high and holy love,
And thou an angel's happiness shalt know;
Shalt bless the earth while in the world above.
The good begun by thee shall onward flow.
The pure, sweet stream shall deeper, wider grow.
The seed that in these few and fleeting hours
Thy hands, unsparing and unwearied sow,
Shall deck thy grave with amaranthine flowers,
And yield thee fruits divine in heaven's immortal bowers."

One great advantage which came to these many stranger girls through
being brought together, away from their own homes, was that it taught
them to go out of themselves, and enter into the lives of others.
Home-life, when one always stays at home, is necessarily narrowing.
That is one reason why so many women are petty and unthoughtful of any
except their own family's interests. We have hardly begun to live until
we can take in the idea of the whole human family as the one to which
we truly belong. To me, it was an incalculable help to find myself
among so many working-girls, all of us thrown upon our own resources,
but thrown much more upon each others' sympathies.

And the stream beside which we toiled added to its own inspirations
human suggestions drawn from our acquaintance with each other. I