If you have read that pearl of stories, “Cranford,” you will remember how Mrs. Jenkyns, to avoid explaining things to the small Deborah, “took to stirring the fire or sending the ‘forrard’ child on an errand.”  Now, unlike Mrs. Jenkyns, I believe in explaining my views to the “forrard” children, as I think the superiority of girls over boys consists in the remarkably early age at which girls begin to be reasonable!  After expressing such a high opinion of you, I hope you will all prove me right, by seeing the truth that underlies the theory I am putting before you, which I am sure you will all be inclined to reckon as a fallacy!

There is no need for me to dwell on the desirability of holidays being made pleasant for you—­fathers and mothers are only too ready to do it; but there is a need for somebody to dwell on the desirability of holidays being made pleasant for fathers and mothers.  They are too unselfish generally to speak for themselves, especially in holiday time.  I hear them saying, in deprecation of my hard-heartedness, “Oh, let the poor children have a good time! they can only be young once; they work hard at school, let them have a little fun in the holidays.”  I quite agree:  I believe in as much fun as you can get:  I should like to be able to insist as sternly on your all enjoying yourselves in the holidays, as I should on your working in term-time.  There was a great deal of sound wisdom in that Eastern potentate, who proclaimed a general holiday, adding, “Make merry, my children, make merry; he who does not make merry will be flogged!”

At the same time, much as I care for your having fun, I do not see why “fun” should mean upsetting all the household arrangements, and doubling the servants’ work, by your late hours in the morning; at all events, after the first few mornings, when perhaps it is only natural you should wish to feel your liberty.  But sooner or later you will have to learn that liberty, for reasonable beings, only means being free to forge your own chains,—­being free to make such rules as you know are necessary, if you are to live a wholesome, health-giving life.  Being late for prayers is hardly a form of self-government which we should admire in the abstract, though it is very tempting in practice; and keeping your mother waiting for her breakfast, or else letting her have a solitary meal, is hardly a good way of being that domestic sunbeam which schoolgirls are supposed to have time to be,—­in holidays!

Holidays are sometimes spent in incessant excursions with young friends, leaving your mother at home to look after the little ones; and yet, perhaps, your mother had a very dull time of it in term-time, when you were either at work, and could not be spoken to, or were busy over school gossip with some friend, and, perhaps, she looked forward to the holidays as a time when she would get a little companionship from the daughter for whom she makes so many sacrifices.  But she is too unselfish to be the least drag upon