tainly, and perhaps a college education for the American mind to an appreciation of a younger brother or sister. Once in college an ambitious girl gets into a swim of things she wants to do. Besides the fifteen to twenty recitations a week, without which her craving for knowledge cannot be satisfied, she finds a world of smaller interests with which she seriously identifies herself or as seriously lets alone. There are the Philolethians or the Idlers, and the Colonial Dances, and the concerts, and the Shakespeare Clubs, and the lectures, and all the complexities of new thoughts and new personal relations, all of which this tense young woman wishes to take at a gulp, as Great Opportunities of life, and with a solemnity that defeats their very end. This is perhaps not unnatural while so many of our American girls have still to seek their culture otherwhere than in their own homes, the while they are still too young to realize that not what they acquire, but what they enjoy, is at once the test and the measure of their culture. Co-ordinate with Americanitis as interfering with the health of the undergraduate is her inheritance of what I should like to call, if nobody objects, Johncalvinitis-meaning that contempt for the body which is, let us hope, the last outcropping of those old Puritan ancestors of ours, who prayed as if they had lost their souls, and ate as if they had lost their bodies. I am very sure of this because I have watched the undergraduate eat, and she eats badly. She chooses her food apparently from pure caprice or from a personal idiosyncrasy that ought to be reformed. Doubtless she knows very well, having learned it in the laboratory, that proper nutrition is secured only by the combination of certain food substances in certain proportion; nevertheless, she makes her luncheon of bread and butter and tea, and pie, if she feels like it, and her dinner of a soup and a salad. There is still much to be done, you see, in educating the gustatory instincts of the college woman, as undoubtedly there is still room for improvement in the composition and preparation of the daily bills of fare, even in our largest and richest colleges. When, to the elemental education in cookery which the ideal college for women is going to supply, there is established, also, a chair of gastronomy for the education of the American palate, and the elevation of the dignity of cooking as a science and of eating as a fine art, such an affront to the educated palate will no longer be possible as was recently set before an honored Englishwoman in one of our most important women's colleges. It was a Sunday-night "tea" at six o'clock, after a heavy mid-day dinner, and it consisted of hot biscuits, cold sardines, hot chocolate, stewed cherries and chocolate cake. Surely the ability to detect with appreciation the subtle blending of an exquisite sauce, or the flavor of a salad, or the power of making a harmonious composition of companionable savors in a single meal, is as distinctly a result and a test of culture as the appreciation of the eye in painting, or the ear in music, while the ability to set forth a suave and delicate dish as the product of one's own skill possibly contributes as much to the sum of good in the world as a moderately bad translation of a German pessimist, or even a new manifestation in philanthropic possibilities. Supposing, for a moment, that the coming century were to have in it the seeds of a new Carlyle, it might be considered a service to mankind if some college woman could contrive to give us the philosopher without the dyspepsia. The attitude of the average woman undergraduate toward athletics is usually misunderstood. The Sunday illustrated papers to the contrary, very few college women live in golf clothes or sweaters, or wear snowshoes to recitations. On the contrary, most of them detest "gym," and evade its practice whenever they can, by any allegation of physical infirmity or other necessity. Too often their sole concession to the needs of their young muscles is a long walk, at infrequent intervals, with another girl, while the two talk about their worries, or their college work, or their present needs, or their future purposes. The question of physical exercise is, as any college president knows, one of the most perplexing in the college life; its necessity is so fundamental, and its accomplishment so unsatisfactory. And yet there is something too natural and spontaneous in the rebellion against the gymnasium to admit of the reproof that prudence suggests. It would seem as though the young women have discovered instinctively for themselves that, at its best, a splendidly gaged; young men are not enthusiasticequipped gymnasium is only a substitute ally prepossessed in favor of the woman for the real thing, and that its use is path- collegian, and, any way, the circles of inological rather than physiological. The timacy are already established, and she true physical exercise is unconscious of stands quite outside them. Meantime, self-improvement as its purpose or end; it with noble ambitions, but with unformed is pure overflow. The gymnasium is for purposes and undirected powers, she longs those who train with purpose and with mightily for something definite and worthy effort, but the ideal exercise is not work, on which to expend herself, and this she it is the muscles playing. However, as usually fancies lies outside the home; things are now, with the forlorn inheritance for she is not yet wise, and her philosophy of overworked nerves and underworked of life is not final, therefore she does not muscles which the average American girl see, as it is to be hoped she will later on, brings into the world with her, the gym- that the richness and rewards of a womnasium is a necessary remedial agent. an's life have nothing to do with that gosSome day, it is to be hoped, we shall en- pel of ambition of which she has possiter upon a physical estate wherein we can bly heard too much. take the open world for a gymnasium, but until that day comes, until the entail has accumulated for several generations, let us still agree to be tolerant of the gymnasium as a distinct means of grace and growth, both literally and figuratively. IV THERE is nothing to be regretted in the fact that nineteen out of twenty young women who graduate from college take up at once some means of earning a livelihood. The twentieth girl, who does not, is the one to be pitied. It is not easy to say which is the harder to bear with equanimity and philosophy, the postponements of youth or the disillusionments of middle age. I sometimes think we pay too great consideration to what has been called "the decline in animal heat," and too little to the demands of leaping young blood, in whose red corpuscles inheres the necessity for instant declaration and activity. Thus it is that the twentieth girl often finds her first year out of college the hardest one in her life. After four years of definite routine work, done in the "sweet serenity of books," with like-minded friends to give zest to labor and rest to recreation, she now finds herself in a world with which she has grown greatly out of touch. The home life has become adjusted to her absence, and, much to her surprise, goes on smoothly without her. Some of the girls who were her friends before her college days are already married, and some hopefully en Therefore, if the young woman graduate have any desire at all for activity outside the home, she will be much happier and healthier and better satisfied with herself if she can win the consent of a doubting father or an over-tender mother to let her go about it at once. The mere fact that her father possesses a competence and is perfectly willing to continue her support need not weigh against her wishes. There are other necessities than dollar ones. If the girl has right royal good sense, there will, in time, develop in her character areas of wisdom, and she will come back all the more contented, after her little fling in the busy world, to marry some wisely chosen and fortunate young man, or to comfort her father and mother in their declining years, and hold her sway in the home, well sunned and ripened by her added experience. Besides, there is always the chance that she may develop real talent for the work she has undertaken, and, distancing her brothers in the race for fame, become herself the family pride and prodigy. Usually a baker's dozen or more of the nineteen graduates who must work drift into teaching. Not that they specially like it, or feel their ability to shine as educators, but because it is the work that lies closest to the traditions and interests of the college life, and because it is still the one profession into which the door swings most easily for women. Hundreds of college-bred women have been, and are, capably and efficiently engaged in teaching, and a few have gained a certain distinction as presidents and professors in colleges for women, but no great and original educator has come from among them. Occasionally a determined young graduate gets a foothold in a newspaper office, and usually keeps it with credit to herself and her higher education, yet the few women editors of eminence have not been college-bred, and there is nothing to be gained by concealing the fact that the college women who have undertaken journalism seem, as yet, to have had no influence in sweetening the flood of sensational and nasty print for which the newspaper women of the country must bear their share of discredit with the newspaper men. The number of college women who have taken up medicine is considerablesome of them, no doubt, from a real love of science, and some for love of a career. While their work has been able and their success undoubted, it is just to say that they have not contributed originally to medical science. There are a few women collegians in law, in literature, in the pulpit, and in other professions, and their helpfulness and enthusiasm have been especially noticeable in educational and philanthropic work; they have done much to promote University Extension, in the upbuilding not to say the uplifting-of the public schools, while in the college settlements, the free kindergartens, and in the gracious charities that spring therefrom their tact and courage have been unflagging and undaunted. In all these fields of usefulness the work of college women, "taken by and large," has been good, honest, competent work, about like that of the average industrious man; but it has been derivative, not creative; complemental, not brilliant; offering little opportunity for sex celebration on the part of those enthusiasts who believe that women have needed only a diploma and a ballot to be brilliantly equipped for conquering all the world that men have left unconquered. The most notable work undertaken by college women in their thirty years of opportunity is one which is still in its infancy, but which, when developed, is likely to do more for that emancipation for which believers sigh than all the legislation of men and all the oratory of women. In the chemistry of foods, the science of nutrition, the sanitation of the house, the economics of the home, their work has been both original and thoroughly scientific. It has not only added something to science, but has opened up certain new departments in special sciences. That the one original contribution of college women to the thought of the world should have been made upon these lines is pleasing and significant, for it puts the most efficient work of the educated woman in the same category with the most efficient work of all other women-with those humanizing and conserving and elaborating forces which add content and extent to life, and which are—when shall we be satisfied to learn it ?—just as fundamentally important, just as dignified, and (if we must also be heroic) just as difficult, as the constructive and creative forces. Perhaps, also, the suspicion is to be deduced that women are contributing most helpfully to the world when they are willing to develop those abilities and possibilities with which custom, or prejudice, or nature-call it what you will-has made them most familiar; when they are not working in the direction of greatest resistance; when they are not pulling upstream. Be that as it may, it hardly seems that the achievements of the college woman are as yet remarkable enough to cause men to sit uneasily upon their thrones, or to fear that they will be asked, for some time to come, to step down and take off their crowns. The college woman has justified herself by being hopefully "average" after all. The education she wanted she has had; it was right and just that she should have it, and it has done her good. Possibly it will do her still more good when she is able to forget it, or, if she must remember it, if she can realize that, in having it, she is to-day no farther ahead of the rest of the world than her mother was twenty-five years ago, when she carried home in triumph the diploma of the academy or the high-school where she had finished her education. A PRAYER FOR RAIN By Rupert Hughes Lo, Father, how thine earth is devastate, Thy far-spread greenlands yellowing with the heat, Shall all the ploughing and the seeds of spring, Upon the heaven, whence suns unpitying beat, Iowa. IMPRESSIONS OF MOUNT RAINIER By Israel C. Russell NE July evening my boat was drifting with drooping sail on the placid waters of Puget Sound. The glories of a long northern twilight were slowly fading into the more mysterious beauties of a perfect summer night. Against the pale yellow of the western sky was drawn the serrate outline of the blue-white Olympic Mountains. In the north rose the solitary cone of Mount Baker, with the now extinct crater near its summit clearly visible. Beyond the dense forests of the eastern shore several of the snow-clad summits of the Cascade Mountains were bathed in ruddy light. Most glorious of all, in its massiveness and strength, was Mount Rainier, eighty miles away to the southward. At the base of that monarch of the mountains of the Far Northwest, the forests were shrouded in mist, but far above the vapor-wreaths, in calm repose, rose the vast snow-covered dome, so clearly illuminated by the rosy light that each crag and precipice, each glacier and snow-field, was distinctly traceable. As the twilight deepened the great mountain became a silhouette of delicate blue against the deeper tints of the darkening sky. Slowly the image faded, leaving me half in doubt whether an earthly scene of exquisite beauty had met my gaze or a vision of dream-land crossed my fancy. A few weeks later I was treading a narrow pathway through the magnificent forests to the southward of Puget Sound. About me rose the massive moss-covered columns of ancient fir-trees and giant ce |