and outdoor life, in a more varied and delightful social life--than they
were fifty or even twenty-five years ago. But it is a question whether
the joy of intellectual work has kept pace with this joy of life in its
other aspects. Sometimes it almost seems as if intellectual eagerness
were in inverse ratio to the ease and fullness of the opportunities we
have. At least many fair-minded girls have seen the predicament in
which the teacher is placed. The man who makes a vase for the use and
pleasure of others may rejoice not only in his own workmanship but also
in the thought of the service and delight he is giving to others. That
is, his pleasure is twofold. The teacher who is deprived of some
response of joy in the work he is doing is a workman deprived of his
rights. To those girls who are thinking of becoming teachers this should
be a sobering thought.

Missionary teachers, with their students eager to get anything they have
to give, are not to be pitied. Our schools and their groups of teachers
in isolated and uncultivated parts of the West and South are not to be
pitied. Even if education is with them shorn of much that gives it
charm, the opportunities that come are prized. Students and teachers
have intellectual joy in the work they do, and without that the greatest
university in the world might as well, or better, be a district school,
for then the work done would be truly useful. It is the teacher who has
to put much of her time and energy into making a subject superficially
attractive enough for a student to elect it, who is to be pitied. A
classroom full of blasé girls whose minds need to be tickled before
there is the least expression of intellectual mirth upon their faces, is
an ordeal not lightly to be met except by the professional joker or
academic tumbler.

Girls often become impatient with themselves, and that is one reason why