A woman in the city must be
constantly on her guard against this peculiar temptation.

Perhaps at this point it will do no harm to insert a few commonplace
rules for study.

Do not try to study too many things at once.

Try to do all your work thoroughly, even if you do not get beyond the
rudiments in anything.

Do not be in a hurry.

It is said that eagerness to finish things shows weakness. It certainly
leads to shallowness, "Without haste, without rest" was Goethe's motto.
I have heard of a woman who began to study botany at ninety. That shows
a mind so trained and cultivated that the soil could not be exhausted
with age. How good it was that she was still fresh enough to respond to
new thoughts! She might have learned as much botany in a course of
lectures when she was twenty, and have listened to a dozen other courses
at the same time, without half the delight and inspiration she had at
ninety; that is, receiving so many new ideas at once at twenty might
have made her mind more jaded than the gradual, steady unfolding of many
more ideas during a lifetime.

I know a lady of forty-five who within the last month has taken her
first piano lesson. She did not even know the meaning of the letters,
and yet she has already made wonderful progress. She will probably never
become a great player, though her fingers are unusually supple and she
has some musical ability. But even if she does not, a new world of
thought and beauty is opening to her.

I have just heard of another lady of seventy who went abroad for the
sake of learning the French language.

It is a great mistake to think that all we are to learn must be begun
before we are thirty lest we may not have a chance to make a practical
use of it. Culture is within and not without.

I hope that I shall have as many readers in the country as in the city,
and country people are not distracted with opportunities for culture.
Indeed, they often think they have none. I will tell you the stories of
three cultivated country women.

One lived on a farm a mile from the post-office, and there was not much
money for her to spend. There were half a dozen cultivated families in
the village including that of the minister, and among them were to be
found most of the books which make the best literature. She knew how to
use both these friends and these books, and at twenty she was better
read than her Boston cousins. As she did not see her friends often, she
was more care