Girls and Women

by Harriet E. Paine

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 careful to make every call tell, and her visitors said it was delightful to go to see her, she had such fresh things to say to them and such interesting questions to ask. She studied botany by herself and became expert. She learned mathematics so well in the public school that when she began to think she would like to see something of the world outside her corner, she was able to get good places to teach. First, she went to a seaside village and there she learned a thousand new things. Then she spent a few years at the West, varying her route in going and coming till she had seen a large part of her own country. By this time she had saved enough money to go abroad and study quietly for a year. Now, she had her French and German, and she saw pictures and heard music and visited cathedrals and discovered how other people lived. But by and by her sisters died, and she was needed at home. Of course she was a great acquisition in the village, and she had many sources of enjoyment in pursuing the studies she had begun. But she wanted new thoughts too. She invited a friend to spend a month with her, and when she found that her friend had made a study of chemistry she sent for a few dollars' worth of chemicals and set up a satisfactory laboratory in the barn. Naturally she made the acquaintance of every desirable person who visited the village, and moreover her Boston relatives were always eager to have her for a guest, as she was interested in all their favorite pursuits in an entirely original way.

Another girl lived in one little town till she was thirty, and then married a man of culture whose home was in the city. His sisters said she was a beauty and had good taste in dress; and they thought these things had captivated their brother. But first they had to own that she was a woman of fine character, good-tempered, dignified, truthful and modest, for these virtues flourish in the country quite as often as in the city. But still, they knew that she had had no education, and they expected no intellectual companionship. Then it proved that she had read more thoughtfully than they had. They belonged to a dozen literary societies, but the one little village Shakespeare Club had done good work. The sisters always went to the theatre every week in the winter, but the bride who could count on her fingers the plays she had heard, had selected these so carefully that her taste was already well formed. Then she proved to be musical. Small as the village was, there had been one young lady in it who had had the best musical advantages. Our heroine had not let this opportunity slip. She had not heard many concerts, but she had practiced the best music. She had studied Latin, of course, in the village high school, and French with a French lady who spent her summers in the neighborhood. She had treated herself every year to five dollars' worth of Soule's photographs, and she had studied these so carefully that she really knew something of the great artists.

Then she had traveled! She had begun to teach in her own village when she was eighteen, and every summer she had spent a little of her salary in some interesting trip. As a teacher, she had taken advantage of excursion rates to the great National Teachers' Institutes. In this way she had visited most sections of the United States. And she had planned her trips so thoughtfully that she had been alive to everything which was to be seen. Once she had even taken the accumulations of several years and spent her summer abroad. The sisters looked scornful at this. How could anybody see anything worth seeing with an excursion party? Yet they had to own that what we see depends on the eyes we have as much as on our surroundings. She could not see everything in three months, but she knew what she wanted to see, and she had thoroughly assimilated that by much thought about it before and after the journey.