Choosing A Career

Une Bharp lesson of the autumn's panic, and, indeed, of our shifting American tortunes without any panic at all, is the wastetul folly and cruelty of the old education of woman. It is folly, in an economie sense, that ignores the sharp possibihties of the future for our girls, while we send our boys out into Hfe fullv equipped for the fray. The young man, returned from college or the scientific school, in the bright glow of dawniug powers, untrammeled as yet by care, and under the shelter ot his father's roof, decides upon his career. Admiring aunta and sisters waft their prayers and hopes upon the winds that wmg his sail ; the father's experience and counsel pilot the boat throügh the shallow waters near the shore. Everything áids his start- youth.freshness, and special training. He has no responsibilïty upon him save for his own health and good behavior. When does a woman choose her career ? In middle age; broken down by sorrow when she has seen her life's hopes go down one by one in the horizon. As u gul, she has waited in her father's house tor the lover who never came. AH of youth has gone by in vague dreams. In the frivolous business of fashionable society her strength has spent itself . Her hands are skill-less save in delicate embroidery ; her bruin is sluggish, though it aches with new anxiety and despair. Heavily weighted with responsibility, it may be, with the broken-down fat her or alway9 invalid mother now suddenly dependent upon her, she sets out upon this uew path with weak, uncertain steps. Begmning a career at forty, all untrained ! The daughter of her washer-woman can distance her ; the girl who used to bring home her shoes has already shot far ahead. She scarce used to notice these girle, save when they were thinly ciad or looking hungrier than usual. It was easy to loosen her purse-strings or seiid them into the Bervaut's room to be waruied and fed. Where are they now, while she is halting, timorous, on the sharp stones of the highway ? The washer-woman's girl is a salaried teacher in the model school house yondei ; the other is book-keeper in her father's shop, and it pays her well. Ah! that artisan father, that mother toiling early and late, had a deeper wisdom in their need than the merchant, the clergyman, the railway king, in his homof power. What cruelty like to their indulgence now. The unreasoning foudness which reared their girls in luxurious helplessness, which assumed the future as certain in its golden round, has itó parallel in other lands. There are Asiatic fathers who put out the eyes of a girl that she may be a more pathetic beggar. To the study of this Chinese prototype we commend the American father who, choosing a career for his boys in the fine freshness of early manhood, leayes his darling daughter helpless amidst the buffets of the changing tide. Harper's Magazine for Juli. Sumncr's " Greatest Mistake." The Washington correspondent of the Sacramento Record writes : Here let me mention what recently, in my presence, feil from the lips of an old friend of Charles Suniner, as to that statesman's mistaken mode of lite. " Sumner," he said " labored under the idea that every ilhiess Ue had procemlod trom tne Dlow 01 reston iJrooKs' muugeon. That was the greatest mistake he ever made ; and but for that idea there is no reason to suppose he would not be alive and vigorous to-day. With a frame and a constitution so naturally strong, he might easily have lived 20 years louger. It was only a week before he died that I saw him in the Senate Chamber. In response to an inquiry as to his health, he told mo that he had had a touch of his old complaint, but was a little better again. ' Sumner,' said I, ' let me give you a bit of advice. Give up your wine and late dinners. No man past 50 can make a regular thing of such late winedinners as you take.' ' Why, ,' said he, ' you surprise me ! Do you really believe that?' But 'the caution produced uo great impression. He went on as before - eating and driuking his choice wines - although he never becamn in the least intoxicated of course - spending hours over his dinner with some invited or chance guest at his house - rarely rising from the dinner table until 9 o'clock ; and, then, perbaps, he wrote and went to bed with all the great mass of undigosted dinner lying dead within him. No wonder he needed hypodermic injections to make him sleep. Why, Wormluy says - Wormley was his oaterer, you know - that he believes that it was the dinner that he ate the night before he died that killed him, and if he had only taken an emetic he might have been saved. And, besides his late dinners, Sumner took very little exercise. He died in the belief that it was the cane that did it; but it was the late and long protracted dinner. Had he realized the truth he would hava been alive to-day."