extend the province of women is in opposition | is not work enough; and yet our prejudices are to the will of God, as expressed in Revelation; a little startled when we find women at occubut I can not find it so set down. When St. pations more unusual than seamstressing and Paul says, "I will that the younger women teaching. I confess to an individual shrinking marry, bear children, guide the house, give from the thought of woman on the rostrum-a none occasion to the adversary to speak re- public speaker addressing a crowd; and yet I proachfully," there is not only the law but the hear now of such a woman, who joins a woman's prophecy of whatever makes the delight of a modesty to a rare eloquence, who uses her talwoman's life; but there are the women to whom ents worthily, and who declares that she had is never given the "house" to guide; there are tried to earn a living in ways usual to women, the widows, some bereaved by death, and some and had failed. Which is right, those who think by the devil; some with children, some with- that a woman should never be an orator, or God, out; there are the daughters and sisters, who who made her an orator? Granting that all become as mothers to their parents, or the women are adapted to the two occupations above younger members of their family. Is it any quoted, which is by no means the case, all wowhere said of these that they shall work at men can not live by them, because the supply starvation prices, and under every possible con- of operatives in these departments is already far dition of hardship? Does God really endow in advance of the demand. We shirk the fact woman alone, out of the whole creation, with of woman as a worker, and shrink from educatfaculties which it is a sin for her to use? and ing her to face it. As a consequence, in six does he place her daily and hourly in exigen- cases out of ten, the woman, thrust suddenly cies which it is a sin for her effectually to meet? down from the niche of home among the rough, In that case there should be only as many wo- struggling crowd in life's arena, finds herself at men as are quite sure of getting husbands, war- a loss, her faculties all abroad, and herself comranted, of course, to outlive them; for the pres-pelled to seize on the first method of moneyent system of female labor is a monstrous injustice, and affords opportunity for much actual oppression; and all women should be after one model, for there is now a disheartening amount of power wasted on women.

making of which she has or can acquire a smattering. Hence the complaint that the majority of women who apply for employment understand nothing thoroughly. And here is one cause of the fact that female operatives are the worst paid as well as worst taught of the labor

Moreover, there is an idea extant that it costs a woman less to live than it costs a man; at least that is the excuse with which is glossed over the fact that women, performing the same

There are many women whom no application, however conscientious, can make into modeling classes. housewives and deft seamstresses, as there are many whom no process can turn out in any other shape; there are women with great executive ability, and women with a peculiar aptitude for teaching, and women with a taste for mathe-work equally well, and having the same responsmatics, and women with a turn for languages, and women with what are called good business heads. The century has been oppressed all at once with a Mrs. Browning, a Jenny Lind, a "George Elliot," a Mrs. Stowe, a Catherine Beecher, a Rosa Bonheur, a "Gail Hamilton," a Harriet Hosmer, a Florence Nightingale, to say nothing of the lesser lights that nearly put our eyes out on every side. Speaking with all due reverence, was it wise of the Lord to bestow these great gifts on women? for He did bestow them. Ought not these women to hide their talents in a napkin, like the man in the parable? If so, then there is better justice done to every frog that has not only disposition and legs but space to jump in; every caterpillar that comes to wings; every salmon that leaps up the falls; every fly that has leave to live its life. If not, if the opportunity for development be accorded to those women to whom God has given genius, is it not just as clearly due to women, to whom God has given labor for their portion? and once concede that it is right for a woman to work at all, and you have conceded that almost every other fact connected with the present system of female labor is wrong.

The very first consequence is the demand that more avenues of industry shall be opened to women who must work, and for whom there

ibilities, are paid less than men in similar positions. But the butcher, the baker, the grocer, the landlord, the coal-dealer, the shoemaker, the railroad companies charge her as much for self and children as they would paterfamilias. But granting the excuse. When a man, an institution, or a company pays men in his or its service, they are paid for so much work done. We don't find any body saying to them, "I pay you less to-day because I find it costs you less to live than I thought, and unless I look sharp after you you will be opening a bank account." When the man, company, or institution turns about to pay women for precisely the same work and responsibilities, as well performed and as well met, what has he or they to do with how much it costs a woman to live? Why not pay her also for so much work done, and let her open her bank account if she can? It would be done with the finishing of this paragraph if any of you who have the power could but once comprehend what those three little words, "a struggling life," mean for the majority of women on whose lots they are graved; and though experience is the only exhaustive illustration, by subtraction and squeezing you may approximate the realizing sense.

Subtract from your own house cleanliness, conveniences, room, and ventilation, till you have

reduced it to a room worth six dollars per month | sweetness. But even as I outline it you would in a tenement house. Subtract privacy and shudder at the possibility of a similar appeal quiet, as in such a house every room hears dis- being made in behalf of your wife and children. tinctly the clamor in every other room, and the You are a wealthy man, a careful man, with din in the street and surrounding yards. Sub- property well invested, and every thing insured tract every mouthful of fresh air, because what- but said wife and daughters. Your wife is an ever your personal cleanliness there will pour in admirable woman, who leans entirely on you, at your door and windows the reek of all the and who years ago acquired something faceunwashed rooms and people, drains, standing tiously styled an "education," which she has pools, horrible cookery, stables, and factories in been forgetting ever since. Your daughter-I the neighborhood. Suppose yourself and children have a little china shepherdess on my table. there, because at the rate at which you are paid She has pink cheeks, a simper, a blue kirtle, you can afford to live nowhere else. Squeeze yellow slippers, and a hollow back. Turn her out of your life all hope, because by working face to the wall and there is your daughter, in from early morning often till midnight you can an emergency. Your are a safe man; but so just earn money to remain where you are, and was your neighbor Kegge, of the great firm of every day you grow weaker. Subtract from your Barrel and Co. He was President of the Pot table every thing but poor bread and weak black of Gold Company, with a capital of five milltea, often without sugar and milk. Subtract from ions; and there was a map of the country around your life all visits, walks, books, newspapers, and the foot of the rainbow, and a scrap of the rainrides for self and children, to say nothing of more bow itself, in his office. And yet Kegge's fine ambitious pleasures. Subtract from your ward- brown-stone house stares at you blankly now robe all but the clothes in which you are ashamed from out its curtainless windows, and you reto see your children and yourself, and which are member with a chill how you saw Mrs. Kegge to be continually washed, darned, and patched to stealing away in the twilight with her little ones, be kept in their present decency; remembering and thought, if that were your wife and Jennie! that, as you are living now up to your last cent, Ah! riches have wings, even when there is no new raiment is, of course, impossible. Squeeze Pot of Gold in the case; thieves break through out the strength and elasticity from your body, and steal. Antonio's luck may be yours. And leaving only a dull sense of aching, fever, fa- are there so many barriers, after all, between tigue, and sleeplessness. your wife and the working woman of whom we were talking?

But

A frightfully large number of women in this way do achieve the magnificent income of thirty- At times you are concerned for your Jennie. three cents a day; but as I have not statistics She is the young lady about whose streamers, from which to be sure that this is the average frisettes, train hoops, ankles, hats, back-hair, we will grant you a little more. Say that you and general coquetry and shallowness, press and earn from three to four dollars a week. Sub-people are alternately serious and witty. tract all cheering prospect for your children; for at the earliest age possible they are to be set at work, to commence for themselves the life that you are now dragging out. You understand perfectly that there is no way out for you. You remember that you walked days in search of employment, and were on the verge of distraction; and considered yourself supremely fortunate to obtain this work, for which you are wretchedly paid, it is true, but you are paid the average price: your employers are fair men. You are not paid in uncurrent money, or cheated out of five or six cents on a dollar, under pretense of a general fund for illness, or obliged to wait two or three weeks for your money, or savagely abused and insulted, as happens to hundreds of others. You are not the exceptional case, but the average working woman, and have been tolerably fortunate, though you do work all the day and late into the night for an exist ence, in which there is no rest, no change, no pleasure, no beauty, no ease, no improvement, and no special aim or incentive possible beyond the common life-preserving instinct.

I have given an indifferent sketch after all, for I can find nothing gray enough to paint it to the life. There is too much spring and sparkle in our language to express a thing so thoroughly exhausted of flavor, coloring, and

has she really any thing else allowed her besides development in back-hair and ends of ribbon? She is a healthy girl, with an exuberance of animal spirits. She is not intellectual: your library is to her the dullest room in the house. She is not musically inclined: she would cheerfully bid her piano good-by forever. The household labor devolves entirely on your servants; the responsibility on her mother. What is left her in life but diamond dust? She has surplus energy, and she works it off in her dresses and her flirtations. Suppose that instead she used it in acquiring the art of, let us say, printing? But now that I have written it I see that it looks absurd in this connection; and yet it is a profitable and desirable art, and would be an admirable thing just now for Arabella Kegge, who last year outshone Jennie at Saratoga.

There are hundreds of Arabella Kegges, who, in their day, have shone with varying degrees of splendor; there are thousands more who have never shone at all, but commenced the battle of life with their first recollection. Some of these find work on the hard and unequal conditions of which we have been speaking; some fail-and yet live-in an abyss of which we know nothing, unless from hints gleaned here and there from daily papers, and the reports of charitable societies. Of these, even while we

pity, we may say that no one is forced into as the princess in the Arabian story heard from crime that there are always resources-that the stones in the hill. We are told that woGod deserts no one. But let us also recollect men are rash, lack self-control, are incapable of that the devil is old and wise. He might slip combined action, illogical, half-educated. Grant into our hands the first stone to throw in behalf it all. The freedmen called out of yet proof outraged virtue, but he does not come to us, founder depths and were heard. It is said that safe at home among our children, with sugges- men will oppose the movement; but where wotions revolting to womanhood, because that men faint and falter men will take the matter would be sheer waste of temptation. We are up, because the presence of a class in our midst in condition to elaborate a dozen different ways under a pressure of hardship, that is constantly out of the dilemma, and can always fall back on sinking them lower in the scale, is detrimental the river, which some one declares can always to the national life; and because it will at last serve woman as a last resource. But the river be clearly understood that under the existing shows blue and glancing through our windows order of things no man's wife, sister, or daughas we sit and talk of it at our ease-no more ter is secure; and so dear drop, though you are like the cold, sullen water washing against the but one, do you see how drops rising from the foul wharf than our present physical and men- mountain tarn, the meadow brook, the shallow tal condition is like that of a woman starved pond, the rushing river, the ocean itself, and through successive days, benumbed, heart and adding themselves to other drops, will descend body, made timid by continual failures and re-again in a rainy impetus from heaven that will buffs, shivering, dying, faint, friendless-urged swell the stream to full flood, sweeping the old by instant dread of death, perhaps; frantic, trunk before it, to strand it on some bank, where, perhaps, for her poor little hungry children, or rotting quietly, it shall enrich the earth it once brothers and sisters, at the end of all her little cumbered? resources, shifts, and expedients-that is the pass at which hundreds are come, even now, as you read; and at this pass the tempter, repulsed a hundred times before, steps in again.

WORKING THE BEADS.

There are charitable institutions, it is true,WITH a touch as delicate as the Spring's

and doors that are never closed against the miserable, and ears that are never deaf to a cry for help; and so there are houses, and inns, and fires, and lights, on the very roads on which travelers, bewildered between storm and darkness, walk off precipices, or wander blindly about till overtaken by despair and death; and there are women-you and I, madam, are, of course among them-who are born conquerors; there are women with faith and firmness, clear perceptions, and readiness of resource that nothing can shake; but this is the superior, not the ordinary woman. The only one who has met Satan face to face and conquered enjoined on us all to pray "that we might"-what? always conquer temptation? No; that we may be "delivered from temptation." Our place, then, is not on the judgment-seat, but by the world's highway, where, like the Samaritan, we may find and save those nigh unto death. There are those beyond our help. There are others, urged on behind them by want of all things, whose perilous condition is a direct claim on the interest of any and every woman. If you have not a surplus hour or dollar, you have influence; for if you think rightly you will find that good is just as infectious as evil. You are only a single drop to the stream; true, and the stream is dwindled, and trickles feebly around the old tree trunk imbedded in its midst. The appeal in behalf of working women is not unfamiliar. From time to time the subject has been spasmodically agitated. Protective Unions have been formed and failed; those of the present day might receive more encourageWe hear as many discouraging voices

ment.

Are wakened the beaded blooms,

The fern that waves, and the moss that clings

Grow on the silken glooms,
And a dew of steel is woven in

By the noiseless finger-looms.
Airy festoons of swinging vines,

And butterflies dipped in gold,
And the meeting curves of Gothic lines
Drawn in the days of old,
Glitter in bright and pearly beads

By the quick, white fingers told.
The laugh is gay as the sparkling dyes,
And the wit flies steely-bright,
As pointless needles with broken eyes

Are passed in the failing light,
Till the beaded flowers are gathered up
In their silken folds at night.

I think while the beautiful work is done
Of the arabesques of thought,

I never forget to wind and run

Round the hard lines overwrought,
In life's mixed pattern of good and ill
Daily before me brought.

Here and there are some fadeless leaves
In the stony pattern cold,

And a few green blades give sign of sheaves
If the threaded roots but hold;
And a life perhaps I have beaded o'er
With a beauty not of gold.

UST as we were commenting last month upon | len could hardly be more accurately represented.

fles the headlands of the river, upon which float a few fragments of ice. Mr. Griswold already stands among the first of the landscapists.

But what shall we do? We are only at the entrance of the large room, where hang portraits by Huntington and Hicks and Stone and Elliott and Hunt, and Mayer's "Love's Melancholy," and Gignoux's large picture of Mont Blanc, and Cropsey's "Gettysburg," and M'Entee's autumnal landscapes, full of the very soul of October; and beyond is the West Room, with some of Colman's Spanish architecture and young Parton's "Adirondack," and a cloud more of works that can not even be named. Of what we mention we can not speak further, except to say that the painters still hold their own.

them. The central figure of the group is a young | rising. It is in his best vein. So is Mr. GrisSouth Carolinian of gentle breeding and graceful wold's "The Last of the Ice." A gray fog mufaspect, whose fair hair flows backward in a heavy sweep, and who stands, in his rusty gray uniform, erect and defiant, without insolence, a truly chivalric and manly figure. Next him, on the right, is an old man, and beyond him the very antipodal figure of the youth in front-a "corn-cracker"rough, uncouth, shambling, the type of those who have been true victims of the war and of the slavery that led to it. At the left of the young Carolinian is a Union soldier-one of the Yankees, whose face shows why the Yankees won, it is so cool and clear and steady. Opposite this group stands the officer with sheathed sword. His composed, lithe, and alert figure, and a certain grave and cheerful confidence of face, with an air of reserved and tranquil power, are contrasted with the subdued eagerness You see, Sirs and Mesdames, that it is not a critic of the foremost prisoner. The men are both young; who has been strolling through the rooms. It is they both understand each other. They may be only a visitor like yourselves, who looks thankeasily taken as types, and, without effort, final vic-fully at the feast of color and form so plenteously tory is read in the aspect of the blue-coated soldier. It will not diminish the interest of the picture if the spectator should see in the young Union officer General Barlow.

spread, and departs grateful for the enjoyment. He sees, not without regret, that the Pre-Raphaelite brethren are very imperfectly represented-that Leutze is altogether absent, and that Gray has but

of the greater general richness of development which the Exhibition of 1866 indicates. Academies may not make great artists; but this Academy certainly gives them a chance to show what they have done.

Mr. S. R. Gifford's rich yellow "October After-three cabinet portraits. But there can be no doubt noon" is mellow and broad. The warm, gorgeous light hangs over the boundless woods pierced by the gleaming stream; but there is an air of "composition" in the picture which harms it, although it has all the characteristic excellences of the artist's manipulation. The collection of Mr. Suydam's pictures tenderly recalls that modest man, that sincere and devoted artist, whose spotless memory will be always faithfully cherished by his companions of the Academy. The pictures are among his best in that special line of tranquil coast scenery of which he was so fond.

FIFTY-SIX years ago Thomas Carlyle, a boy of fourteen, came to Edinburgh University. George III. was completing the fiftieth year of his reign. Wellington was drawing the lines of Torres Vedras. Napoleon was at the height of his power, and England at the depth of her weakness. The Tory Quarterly had been established the year before. Scott's "Lady of the Lake" was just published, and Byron was writing "Childe Harold." Between that time and this, more than half a century, the young student has placed his name among the first of Scotland, and will be always recognized as one of the masters of literature in his century.

But those who remember with what a fresh and stirring voice, like the note of a bugle at morning, Carlyle awakened their hope and faith and enthu

In a certain tenderness and tranquillity of feeling Mr. Suydam's pictures always suggest those of his friend Kensett, of whom he was so fond, and who exhibits a "Lake George," full of his peculiar merits. There is an exquisiteness of sentiment in the forms of this picture which is the truest mark of Kensett's hand, and which none of his friends surpass; and with it is that sincerity which is the chief charm in every work of art. Mr. Elihu Vedder's "Monk in Tuscany" is, like his "Fiesole Land-siasm-who recall how gladly and confidently they scape near Florence," full of a broad clear daylight. leaned upon the vigorous, manly arm of the MenBoth are bold and of a masterly firmness, and the tor who was to guide them safely through the bemonk is a work thoroughly characteristic of Italy, wildering charms of Calypso's isle, and whose steady like a scrap of Browning. So, too, in Mr. Cranch's reproving eye would surely reduce every fair and "In the Harbor of Venice," which is the best work false Lamia to the snake, can not but read with inexhibited by him for some time; there is a local expressible sadness the words in which he spoke to feeling as well as specific fidelity which are truly the youth of to-day at his late inauguration as Reccharming. Mr. Cranch has so thoroughly "felt" tor of the University of Edinburgh. But before we Venice that his Venetian pictures are very satisfac-speak of them let us see him as he was described tory. Mr. Church exhibits only one small picture by a shrewd observer when his moment came to -"A Glimpse of the Caribbean Sea from the Ja-speak: maica Mountains;" but from some peculiarity of treatment the curve of the distant shore seen from laced rectorial gown, left it on his chair, and stepped quietabove looks like a precipice in profile, and singu- ly to the table, and drawing his tall, bony frame into a polarly confuses the eye. But the tropical character sition of straight perpendicularity not possible to one man of the Gulf scenery is unerringly represented by in five hundred at seventy years of age, he began to speak the obedient hand of the master who has so care- quietly and distinctly, but nervously. There was a slight fully studied it. Mr. Hennessy's "In Memoriam" flush on his face, but he bore himself with composure and is a delicate, ghostly work, but the fancy is not dignity, and in the course of half an hour he was obviousagreeable, while his "Drifting" is one of his mostly beginning to feel at his ease, so far, at least, as to have adequate command over the current of his thought. He delightful works. A youth stretched in the bow spoke on quite freely and easily, hardly ever repeated a of a boat gazes at two maidens seated in the stern, word, never looked at a note, and only once returned to and all of them drift upon a sluggish stream by a finish up a topic from which he had deviated. He apolo. twilight pasture, over which the watery moon is gized for not having come with a written discourse. It

"Mr. Carlyle rose at once, shook himself out of his gold