Aunt Rachel; or, Old Maids\' Children.

"What is the matter, my dear" said Aunt Rachel to her favourite niece, Urith Trevelyan, who was spending the Easter holidays with her. "You look fit to be a sister in mind, though I hope not in manners, to the Persian poet, who described himself as \'scratching the head of Thought with the nails of Despair.\'"

"I think life is very difficult," remarked Urith, with a solemn sigh.

"There I partly agree with you," said Aunt Rachel; "especially to people who insist on doing to-morrow\'s duty with to-day\'s strength. I doubt very much if the holiday task, which I see in your hand, is the cause of this gloom."

"Oh dear, no! I was thinking what shall I do with myself when I leave school at Midsummer; it will be so very hard to read by myself."

"My good child, do attend to what you are doing; you are just like the man in the \'Snark,\' who had

          "\'luncheon at five o\'clock tea,
    And dined on the following day.\'

"I wish you would dine off that unfortunate task to-day, and when you have finished it we will talk about your future work."

The task did not take long when Urith fairly gave her mind to it, and the next day she and her aunt started for a distant cottage at the far end of the parish. Urith seized the opportunity, and began as the door closed behind them—

"Now, Aunt Rachel, how can I do everything I ought when I leave school? I shall know nothing of Greek or Roman history, or mythology, or French or German history, or even of English, except the period we have been just doing, and I have done only a few books in the literature class, and none in foreign literature, and I have forgotten all my geography, and I shall have Latin and Greek to keep up, and French and German and chemistry, and I don\'t know anything, hardly, of modern books, or of architecture or natural history, or philosophy, or of cooking"—here, in her ardour, she tripped over a stone, and her aunt availed herself of the pause to say—

"Add Shakespeare and the musical glasses, and you will have a tolerably complete programme before you."

"Yes, Aunt Rachel, you need not laugh, you always say girls are so uneducated, and can\'t respond to literary allusions; but how are they to become educated when there is so much to be done?"

"My dear Urith, there is a very wise Irish proverb, \'Never cross a bridge till you come to it,\' and though this bridge of culture seems such a bridge of sighs to you, I really do not think it need be. In the first place, it has not got to be crossed in one year. You get far more law now than in my young days, for you and your friends are not expected to come out full-blown heroines at seventeen or eighteen; you are almost expected to carry on your education for some time longer. It is not safe to count on it, for real life may come on you in a dozen ways when you once leave the safety of the schoolroom, but you will probably get several years of tolerable quiet, and, if I were you, I would not spend my first year in a desperate effort to fill up all the gaps in my education, and to go on with school-work in the school spirit. I should take my first year of freedom as the arbour on the Hill Difficulty, where Christian rested; the lord of that country does not like pilgrims to stay there for good, but they go on all the better for it afterwards. I should look on this year as being the ornamental fringe to the intellectual dress you have been weaving for yourself at school. And do not forget that the dress and the trimming are not an end in themselves—they are only to enable you to leave the house with decency, to go about your business; and at the end of the first year I should count up my possessions and see where I was wanting—if the dress proved thin, I would then set to work and furnish myself with a jacket, by hard, steady work in the second year."

"But some of my school-work will be wasted if I don\'t keep it up."

"Quite true; but do not keep it up simply because you have once begun it; some of your lessons will have done their work by ploughing and harrowing your mind, and may be left behind. The use of school is to teach you how to use your mind, and to try your hand at several branches of study, that you may be able to follow whichever suits you."

"But I have not got any particular turn for anything, and it seems a pity to drop things."

"Yes, it is a pity, but you are not going to teach, and you will have to do the best you can. You had better make up your mind, before you begin life, as to what sort of woman you want to be, and then cut your coat according to your cloth, for if you begin by wanting to keep up everything, you will probably end by dropping everything, in despair."

"Well, I want to keep up Latin and Greek and French and German, and Algebra and Geometry and Chemistry and Mechanics, as well as English subjects."

"And seeing that your day will probably be only twenty-four hours long, I fear \'want will be your master\'! If you had a strong turn for any one of these subjects, I should say keep it up, by all means; but as you have not, I have very strong doubts whether you will find mathematics or classics much use to you. You know enough to take them up again if ever you wanted to help a beginner."

"Then do you think Latin and Greek and mathematics no good for a woman?"

"Certainly not; you will read your newspaper, and the books of the day, in quite a different way now that your mind has been trained by these subjects, but you do not need to keep the scaffolding up when your house is built!"

"It does seem a pity!"

"Well, I do not want to debar you from these subjects if you really enjoy them; there would be a reason for going on, if they were intense pleasure to you, but I suspect you do them as \'lessons,\' and, if so, you had better forsake them for things that directly tend to make you useful."

"Oh, cooking and nursing, and that sort of thing."

"Yes; but I was not thinking of that sort of thing. I meant things that bring you closer to others; Madame Schwetchine says that every fresh sorrow we endure is like learning a fresh language, because it enables us to speak to a fresh set of souls in their own tongue, and to sympathize. Every fresh thing that you learn brings you in sympathy with a fresh set of people. It gives pleasure and ease to a stranger to find that some one in his new circle knows his old home, and we can try to be at home in the mental country of each person we meet, so as to be able to respond to them. If you are a genius you can have your own country, and wait in it, till you meet some fellow-countryman; but as you only want to be an ordinary woman, \'not too bright and good for human nature\'s daily food,\' you will give far more pleasure to others, and widen and strengthen your own mind far more, by being able to join on easily to all you meet, than by pursuing some one abstruse study, whether it be mathematics or philosophy."

"But it seems such a small thing to spend one\'s mind in learning odds and ends of other people\'s hobbies."

"But I would have a hobby of my own, and do some steady stiff reading, only, as you are going to be a woman, and not a student, I would choose reading that linked me to as many as possible of other people\'s interests. How dull and shy poor little Miss Smith was yesterday, till I found that she knew Venice as well as I did. After that she quite enjoyed her visit."

"Yes, but I could not have talked about Italy. I never have a chance of going abroad."

"You do not know when you may go, and if you went to-morrow it would be a case of \'No Eyes.\' You do not know an interesting piece of architecture when you see it, you would not know what pictures to look for, you would not know the history of the places you went to, and, in short, you would miss nine-tenths of the best points, for want of knowing they were there."

"Yes; I might read up countries, but it is so unlikely that I should ever see them, that it does not seem much use to read up for nothing."

"Well, supposing that you did not go, but that you had read books on Italian Art, and made out a list of the pictures you wanted to see at each great town—Florence, Venice, Rome, Siena—and knew about each painter, his history, his style, and photographs of his works, and copied out under each picture what good critics had said of it, or at least put a reference to the book where it was mentioned (e.g. Kingsley\'s description of Bellini\'s Doge; Browning on Fra Lippo Lippi\'s Coronation of the Virgin; Ruskin\'s best descriptions); and if you looked out all the famous men of each town, and knew their history, and what parts of the town were sacred to them; if you studied the buildings of each town, looked up its architecture, and tried to draw it from photographs and illustrations, and then hunted out all the poetry and novels about each place, and drew out a sketch of its history, marking where the local history of the town dovetailed into larger European interests, and specially where it touched England—I think, after this, you would enjoy meeting any one from Italy almost as much as if you had been there, and you would not feel you had read up for nothing. I should take a fresh country every year, and make believe that you were going to it next summer, and that you were getting ready to be \'Eyes,\' and not \'No Eyes,\' while there. You would have got the spirit of the country by this, far more than ninety-nine out of a hundred of those who go to it in the flesh. You are leaving school at eighteen, and by the time you are five and twenty, i.e. before you are fully grown up, you might have thus visited Italy, France, Germany, Spain, America, India, which would make you a fairly cultivated person."

"But it is so hard to get books; I can read Ruskin while I am with you, and when I am with Uncle Charles I could find some of the others I should want, but I can\'t get hold of a course of reading at home."

"But if you have such a large peg as Italy on which to hang your reading, you can always find something which bears on it—you can borrow an odd book here and there, or pick up bits in a stray magazine; several of the books you would want are cheap to buy, and, if you keep a list of them, you will be surprised to find from what odd quarters they turn up. People have a way of saying, \'Oh, do recommend me a book,\' as if all subjects were equally interesting, or rather uninteresting, and they borrow the first that comes, reading it as a duty, quite regardless of the fact that it does not belong to anything they have read before, or will read after; but if they had made up their mind on a subject, the lending friend would take far more interest, and probably hunt up something that bore on the subject, while the reader would be more likely to get good."

"But if I begin Ruskin here, and then go home, where I may perhaps find an Italian history, and then go for another visit and find something else, it will all be so disjointed."

"Yes, it would be nicer if you could go on with art or architecture; but your reading will not be so desultory as to be useless, if it is all strung on the one thread of Italy, and then you can group it, as you go along, in a commonplace book. I should take a large one, and divide it among the towns I wanted to see, and then subdivide the pages given to, e.g. Florence, under the heads of art, history, famous men, architecture, poetry, novels, and, as I read anything on these subjects, I should jot down the substance of it under the right heading, or if it was a poem, just give the title and one or two of the best lines. And you could keep up your French and German at the same time—suppose you read Corinne and the Improvisator, they would both help to keep you in an Italian atmosphere."

"Yes, I could keep up my reading, but how about the grammar?"

"I should recommend you to take a very conversational novel and turn a page of it into both French and German every week; this would keep up all the rules of grammar, and, though you might make mistakes, you would gain fluency in expressing yourself, which is much more needed than grammatical accuracy if you go abroad, for a course of lessons will set you right about the grammar at any time, but would not make you talk, if you had allowed yourself to get tongue-tied by not practising translation from English into French; and I should advise you to translate very freely, and use the dictionary as little as possible; if you cannot remember the exact rendering, twist the sentence and paraphrase it, till you can manage it, simply to learn to express your thoughts easily. I should say an hour a week of this would keep up both French and German."

"But you have said nothing of English History and Literature."

"I should be inclined to drop English History for the first year, because you know so much more of that than of Foreign and Ancient History, but if you like it I should take some one prominent reign—Elizabeth or Charles I., or Anne or George III., and get to know all the chief people, read their memoirs, and what they themselves wrote, so as to feel among friends whenever you hear a name of that period mentioned—and read all essays, etc. that you can find upon it. To keep your mind generally open, I should make a chart of contemporary history and another of literature, taking one century a month, and leaving plenty of space for adding things afterwards. In Literature, I should take one of the Men of Letters every month, or one of the Foreign Classics, and at the same time read any of the man\'s own works that I could. Modern poets and novelists and essayists I should read at odd times, specially making it a matter of conscience never to open a novel before luncheon! I should read my poets not only promiscuously, as the fancy took me, but compare their treatment of different subjects; e.g., you might make yourself a private New Year\'s Eve service, of all the poems on it you can find—Coleridge, Tennyson, and Elia\'s prose poem on the same subject. Or you could make a Shepherd\'s Calendar for yourself, and copy out under each month what poets have said about it, and its flowers and features generally: or a Poet\'s Garden; collect all the bits about flowers, and make a \'Poet\'s Corner\' in your garden, admitting no flower that cannot bring some poetry as its credential. It will make country life far more enjoyable if you know your poets as Thomas Holbrook, in \'Cranford,\' knew Tennyson."

"I should like all that, Aunt Rachel; but you have not said anything that sounds like stiff reading yet."

"No; and you ought to have something that will tax all your powers, as well as this general cultivation, which will be all pleasant. I should take some really stiff book, on Logic or Political Economy, or Butler\'s \'Analogy,\' and after each morning\'s work make a careful analysis of the argument, leaving one side of your MS. book blank, that you may put in afterwards any illustrations or criticisms of your own, or others, that may occur to you in the future. I should always keep a stiff book in hand and treat it so, even if all other regularity and plan in my reading fell through—it would be a backbone."

"But I shall have so much writing to do if I am to make a commonplace book on each subject."

"It will make you slower, but much surer. I know a girl who writes a review of every book she reads, giving extracts, and an abstract of the argument and her own opinion of it. She finds it most useful, both as practice in expressing her thoughts and for reference afterwards."

"But it would take so long."

"You would be well repaid, and you would not read any books in your time for study which were not worth taking trouble with. In reading a book, I should put a mark to everything that struck me, and at the end of a chapter should look over the marked bits, and put a second mark to those parts that seemed specially important, after I had mastered the drift of the chapter. It would then be easy, when you had finished the book, to write a review, for you would only look at the doubly marked bits."

"And am I to do no science?"

"I should vary your science with your opportunities, because you have no strong turn for any one in particular. When you go to town in the winter for that long visit you should get some cooking lessons, and before you go you should get the books recommended by the South Kensington Cookery School, and study the bookwork on the subject. When you go away in the summer, you should take up geology, or botany, or whatever suits the place you go to."

"But I shall only have smatterings of things at this rate!"

"Smatterings are very good things in their way, so long as you are not misled into thinking them more than they are! They are the keys which will enable you, in the future, to follow up the subject for which you may have any special opportunities. They also prevent your being quite a dumb note anywhere,—it is something to be able to listen intelligently! Besides, if your mind is open on all sides, you will never find any one dull, for you are almost certain to be able to gain information on some one of the subjects you are interested in."

"I don\'t see how I can get all these things in, Aunt Rachel, for I shan\'t have much time."

"I think you might manage two hours a day, and I should divide the week thus: Monday and Friday I should give to Italy or any subject which you meant to take as the staple of your reading; Tuesday take a science, and Wednesday English literature; Thursday take a stiff book and half an hour of French; Saturday take ancient history or mythology and half an hour of German. I should write an essay every week at odd moments, if I were you, for you ought to think things out for yourself as well as filling your mind with other people\'s thoughts by reading, but you could work out your essay in your head while walking or waiting for any one. I should also advise you to make a list of every book you read after leaving school; you will find it very interesting in after years, especially if you put a short criticism on each."[2]

"But surely I had better do more than one subject in a day? I should get tired of reading one book for two hours."

"You might vary your treatment of the subject. For instance, take notes of the History of Italy for one hour, and look out descriptions of pictures for another. In literature you could read about your author for one hour, and read his works for the next. In your science, give half the time to book-work, and the rest to practical work."

"But would it not be a more thorough change to go to a new subject?"

"So it would, but you may not be able to fit in two hours\' reading with your duty to your neighbour! On any day that you could honestly be only a half-timer, you are far less likely to get careless, and to despair of regularity, if you get a bit of your day\'s subject, than if you have to leave one of your subjects entirely undone."

Even Aunt Rachel\'s good advice came to an end at last, as in course of time did Urith\'s visit, and also the Midsummer term, after which she left school with the best possible intentions, and announced them at home with much dignity. But, far from being allowed to carry on her course of study, it became a study with her two small brothers to prevent such morbid fancies from taking effect. They won golden opinions from the servants those holidays, who said that the young gentlemen had never been so little trouble before. They suddenly became as full of "resources within themselves" as Mrs. Elton herself, to the admiration of the whole family, except of the unfortunate Urith, who might have unravelled the mystery, since the cultivation of her domestic virtues by startling and unexpected interruptions of her reading, occupied such of their spare time as was not devoted to the mental exercise of devising new plans for her discomfiture on the morrow.

But, happily for Urith, holidays are terminable, and when the boys left she hoped to do great things. But visitors came to stay in the house, special friends of her own, with strong theories as to the value of co-operation in the matter of brushing their hair at night.

Midnight conversations did not conduce to work before breakfast or to much energy after it. It was, therefore, with very mingled feelings that Urith welcomed Aunt Rachel, her outside conscience, whose yearly visit was usually an unmixed pleasure to her.

Having written much about her intentions at first starting, she was not surprised when her aunt, on the first evening of her visit, settled herself for a talk, and began—

"How is the reading going on? You were very sensible in saying that you meant to begin at once on leaving school, so as not to get out of the habit of work, and as you have now had three months I suppose you have something to show for it?"

"Well, I thought I should have had, but, you see, the boys wouldn\'t let me!"

"I don\'t see why you need have drawn the boys\' attention to what you were doing; but since they left—"

"The house has been full!"

"Yes, my dear, but as you generally do have visitors, your reading will never flourish at this rate."

"Well, I couldn\'t neglect them."

"No; but they don\'t require entertaining before breakfast, do they?"

"No; but I was so sleepy."

"What time did you go to bed?"

"Well, I suppose I ought not to have stayed in Barbara\'s room, but Alice had so many stories to tell us of her adventures that I did not leave them till after twelve o\'clock."

"As Alice is by no means tongue-tied in the daytime, her adventures might have kept, and if you went to bed in proper time, you might get half an hour before breakfast. But what do you do after breakfast?"

"Oh, then the flowers want doing, and mamma always wants some notes to be answered, and then it is so fine that we go for a walk, and don\'t get back till after luncheon, and then visitors come, and I must be there to talk to them; and when it gets cool, people come in for tennis, and as to reading after that, why, one barely gets time to dress for dinner, and in the evening they like me to play to them, and papa wants the paper read to him, and you know, Aunt Rachel, you always said home duties ought to come first, so I don\'t see when a girl at home is to read!"

"I quite agree with you about home duties, my dear; but, though many things have changed since my day, home duties must have changed most of all, if they now include chattering till midnight, and taking a two hours\' walk in the morning, on days when you are likely to get three hours\' tennis in the afternoon, and being obliged to play in the last set, so that you cannot even go and dress a quarter of an hour too soon! It seems to me that you might get these home duties done by eleven o\'clock, and then get an hour, or an hour and a half, for steady reading, or, if not so much as that, still visitors do not come directly after luncheon: in fact, I noticed that you got through two volumes of that new novel before any one came. Now, that time would have done equally well for history, and even when the boys are at home, their suspicions would not be much aroused if you went to wash your hands for luncheon a quarter of an hour too soon, and the same in the evening before dinner."

"Yes, Aunt Rachel, it all seems very easy when I talk to you, and I feel now as if I should carry out all you say, but I know a hundred little things will come to make it very hard. I wish it were easier to carry out one\'s good intentions."

"I do not wish it for you, my dear; you will be worth ten times more if you have to exert strength of character, than if everything is done for you; we ought to feel a little insulted if Fortune lets us live on too easy terms, though I cannot say, after all, that you have very hard ones. There now! I have given you quite enough advice to start several girls in life. I will only add this: do not get flurried over your work, or insist on doing it when time and strength will not permit; and, on the other hand, do not be self-indulgent!"

    "Like as a star
    That maketh not haste,
    That taketh not rest,
    Be each one pursuing
    His God-given hest."