worn by passion and the antagonisms of life, to the paths of purity and truth. Timothy was admonished that he should lead an exceptionally pure life because of the pious influence of his "grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice."

Hugh Miller derived from his mother his extraordinary genius for narrative. She possessed imaginative faculties, a creative power of fantasy that, with training and education, would have made her a power in the world of literature, either in poetry or romance. Untutored, these powers led her into the endless vagaries that were so powerful among the unlettered people of her day. Her son, surrounded with this weird atmosphere, early imbibed the uncanny notions, and they powerfully influenced him through life. He suffered paroxysms of terror in childhood. The influence of these early impressions, all his subsequent scientific education and research could not overcome. There is little doubt that eventually his early death was caused by this nervous strain. How important it is that mothers should be educated! Errors can be discovered only by intelligent thought. The mind must be trained to reason, to create ideals, to regulate imagination, to direct and modify emotion; all this can be accomplished only by education. What a shortsighted policy was that which established schools for boys before these opportunities were afforded girls!

Mothers should have piety and education; they should also have strong characters, devoted to some mighty ruling purpose. The pettiness of some women is the bane of their children. Consecrated strength and nobility will mold the character that comes under its influence. What a charming illustration of this power do we find in the Booth family, where all the children followed in the path of self-renunciation so faithfully trodden by the parents.

Mothers should have strong bodies as well as carefully trained minds. To these should be added spiritual force and aspiration, for the influence pre-natal and post-natal is immeasurable, not less on mind and soul than on body. A mother whose waist is compressed, impeding the action of vital organs,

cannot have a healthy child; neither can a mother whose mind has been compressed, circumscribed to a round of petty thoughts, be expected to influence her children to intellectual power. Like produces like.

All influence, good or bad, springs from the character and thought. This influence makes its way through an infinite variety of channels. The tone of the voice, the expression of the eye, the pressure of the hand, the unpremeditated act, all make indelible impression on the plastic heart of the youth. Each has its influence on the formation of character. "The world wants men," yes, and women, too. To obtain these, we must have the highest type of mothers. Happy the woman, who, like the mother of the Gracchi, can point to her children and exclaim with joy, "These are my jewels."

Frederick the Great, when he heard of the death of his mother and sister Wilhelmina, exclaimed, "This loss puts the crown on all my sorrows. My spirits have forsaken me. All gayety is buried with the loved ones to whom my heart is bound."

No position in life is superior to the influence of a mother's love. One of earth's noblemen said, "All that I am, all that I have been able to do, I owe to my mother."

There was once a mother whose beautiful, cherished daughter was called in the early days of budding womanhood to the higher service of heaven. In looking over her papers, her mother found these words in her journal, “As I have watched the daily, hourly life of my mother through the years of mingled cloud and sunshine, I feel that I must be true indeed to be worthy of such a mother." Could any music of oratorio be so sweet?

What a proud moment to the mother of James A. Garfield, when, at the pinnacle of earthly honor, his first thought was of the joy his promotion would give that true and faithful heart, and he turned and kissed his mother before addressing himself to the waiting multitude. It was a tribute to the influence that had made his life worthy of honor.

Cowper in his touching address to his mother's picture shows how great a power is exerted in the early years of childhood, and how indelible is the impression of the tender touch of a mother "passed into the skies." Love is indeed a simple fireside thing, whose quiet smile warms earth's poorest hovel to a home, and whose influence radiates from this center to earth's remotest bounds.

Woman's Place in the Business World?

N°

MRS. FRANK LESLIE,

Proprietor and Manager Frank Leslie Publishing House, New York.

OT many years ago had this question been propounded to a circle of business men, the answer would have been unanimous in the negative. Within our memory woman had no place in the business world, and, indeed, seemed, in the opinion of multitudes, to have no sphere of usefulness outside of the kitchen, nursery, and society.

A woman's judgment upon financial matters began and ended with her power of getting her money's worth out of the drygoods merchant, the market man, and the grocer; also, in a good many cases, it was proved in her skill of abstracting money on various sly pretexts from her husband's unwilling pockets.

The husband, adopting the creed of his father, treated his wife just as he did his children, supplying her wants liberally if they seemed to him rational, and denying her wishes with more or less good nature if they seemed to his superior wisdom exaggerated.

After all, the principle is a sound one, that the money getter should be the money keeper and dispenser; it is in the line of justice, and that is the best law of the world in all matters purely worldly, like money earning and money spending.

Perhaps a consciousness of this "eternal fitness" in the matter has been one of the great incentives to woman's wonderful progress in these lines. Her wants have increased tenfold since the days of our meek, domestic grandmothers, and have far outrun any increased facility on the part of our natural pro

tectors, and providers for meeting them. Women saw more and more clearly that to live as they wished and expend as they liked they must have money of their own, and not depend upon the caprice or the capacity of some man's pocketbook.

Besides those who had the choice, there arose more and more prominently into view that great class of women unattached to any man; or, if attached in the sentimental sense of the word, unable to reap any practical or monetary advantages from that attachment; these, too, must live, for even blighted affections do not suffice in lieu of bread and butter.

"Men must work, and women must weep," sings the poet, but unfortunately for woman, her need of weeping does not preclude her need for work, and more and more does that necessity become obvious and pressing.

Woman's first advance into the business world was timid and tentative; she begged humbly to be allowed to do a man's work for half a man's wages, and she received uncomplainingly reproofs and sneers, and criticisms and impositions, that few men would have offered to a fello'y man, and few men would have borne or remained under.

But public opinion, that most powerful of "governors" in the great engine that runs our world in this country, began first to murmur, and then to speak aloud, and at last to shout, that this style of things was both ridiculous and unjust, and therefore untenable. Public opinion announced that work should be paid for, not by the sex of employee, but by the value to the employer. If a woman puts on male attire, goes to a counting-room and does the work of a man satisfactorily and steadily, why as soon as her sex is discovered and she puts on feminine garb is she to be cut down a third or a half from her former wages? But an inborn prejudice is very hard to kill, especially in the minds of those who profit by the perpetuity of that prejudice, and all classes of employers, although not all employers in any class, still persist in the mean discrimination of sex in their payments for work equally well done by male and female employees.