Lady Dorothy Nevill, Mrs. Alfred Morrison, and others, have done much to encourage the Irish workers, and it rests largely with the ladies of England whether this beautiful art lives or dies.  The real good of a piece of lace, says Mr. Ruskin, is ’that it should show, first, that the designer of it had a pretty fancy; next, that the maker of it had fine fingers; lastly, that the wearer of it has worthiness or dignity enough to obtain what is difficult to obtain, and common-sense enough not to wear it on all occasions.’

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The High-Caste Hindu Woman is an interesting book.  It is from the pen of the Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati, and the introduction is written by Miss Rachel Bodley, M.D., the Dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.  The story of the parentage of this learned lady is very curious.  A certain Hindu, being on a religious pilgrimage with his family, which consisted of his wife and two daughters, one nine and the other seven years of age, stopped in a town to rest for a day or two.  One morning the Hindu was bathing in the sacred river Godavari, near the town, when he saw a fine-looking man coming there to bathe also.  After the ablution and the morning prayers were over, the father inquired of the stranger who he was and whence he came.  On learning his caste, and clan, and dwelling-place, and also that he was a widower, he offered him his little daughter of nine in marriage.  All things were settled in an hour or so; next day the marriage was concluded, and the little girl placed in the possession of the stranger, who took her nearly nine hundred miles away from her home, and gave her into the charge of his mother.  The stranger was the learned Ananta Shastri, a Brahman pundit, who had very advanced views on the subject of woman’s education, and he determined that he would teach his girl-wife Sanskrit, and give her the intellectual culture that had been always denied to women in India.  Their daughter was the Pundita Ramabai, who, after the death of her parents, travelled all over India advocating the cause of female education, and to whom seems to be due the first suggestion for the establishment of the profession of women doctors.  In 1866, Miss Mary Carpenter made a short tour in India for the purpose of finding out some way by which women’s condition in that country might be improved.  She at once discovered that the chief means by which the desired end could be accomplished was by furnishing women teachers for the Hindu Zenanas.  She suggested that the British Government should establish normal schools for training women teachers, and that scholarships should be awarded to girls in order to prolong their school-going period, and to assist indigent women who would otherwise be unable to pursue their studies.