ography. This
instrument has come into such general use that no detailed description
of it is here required. Briefly, it may be said that it is an
instrument to print letters and documents with despatch, and it is
worked with keys like a piano. To learn this art of type-writing
requires but a very short time, and there are schools or offices in
most of the large cities where it is taught.

A lady can learn phonography as young as sixteen, or at the mature age
of thirty-five; but it is almost needless to say that the art can be
mastered much easier at the former than the latter age. At one of the
schools in New York where it is taught free to women no pupils are
received under the age of eighteen. It is a study that requires
considerable application, a good memory, nimble fingers, and quick
apprehension. There are some people (and this remark applies to both
sexes) who would never be able to learn enough short-hand to be of any
practical service. But the study is nothing like as difficult as it
has often been represented to be. Every thing depends on the student.
If she makes haste slowly, and learns even a little thoroughly every
day, she will soon find herself mastering the theoretical part of the
art, and if she practises constantly, in season and out of season,
what she has properly learned, the secret of short-hand success is
hers. The necessity of practice cannot be overrated. Hence it is that
a teacher is ordinarily of little use. The exercises in the latest
manuals on this subject are very well arranged, and it would seem that
the art could not be presented in a plainer way than it is at
present.

The pay of a lady amanuensis at the start is seldom more than $8 a
week. It is not to be supposed that she is fully competent when she
starts at that rate; that is to say, she will not be able to write
very rapidly, and she will be liable to make mistakes in transcribing
her notes. The actual practical experience which she will get in her
first situation will very soon serve to correct these faults. It
might, at first thought, be supposed that few persons would desire to
employ inferior help of this kind; but such is not the fact. Editors,
lawyers, occasionally doctors, and some classes of business men who
are obliged to make rough drafts of papers which go at once to the
printer, are often glad of such help. Their short-hand writer can
write fast enough to save some of their time, at a moderate charge,
and it is imm