Our schools and colleges to-day are very much richer in the joy of everything else—­in beautiful surroundings, in freer and fuller athletic and outdoor life, in a more varied and delightful social life—­than they were fifty or even twenty-five years ago.  But it is a question whether the joy of intellectual work has kept pace with this joy of life in its other aspects.  Sometimes it almost seems as if intellectual eagerness were in inverse ratio to the ease and fullness of the opportunities we have.  At least many fair-minded girls have seen the predicament in which the teacher is placed.  The man who makes a vase for the use and pleasure of others may rejoice not only in his own workmanship but also in the thought of the service and delight he is giving to others.  That is, his pleasure is twofold.  The teacher who is deprived of some response of joy in the work he is doing is a workman deprived of his rights.  To those girls who are thinking of becoming teachers this should be a sobering thought.

Missionary teachers, with their students eager to get anything they have to give, are not to be pitied.  Our schools and their groups of teachers in isolated and uncultivated parts of the West and South are not to be pitied.  Even if education is with them shorn of much that gives it charm, the opportunities that come are prized.  Students and teachers have intellectual joy in the work they do, and without that the greatest university in the world might as well, or better, be a district school, for then the work done would be truly useful.  It is the teacher who has to put much of her time and energy into making a subject superficially attractive enough for a student to elect it, who is to be pitied.  A classroom full of blase girls whose minds need to be tickled before there is the least expression of intellectual mirth upon their faces, is an ordeal not lightly to be met except by the professional joker or academic tumbler.

Girls often become impatient with themselves, and that is one reason why there is so little joy in work for them.  Think of Helen Keller as a famous example of this joy in work under the most adverse circumstances.  What could be greater than her handicap?  Shut away from the world by deaf ears and blind eyes and, for a while, by inability to speak, she has nevertheless shown a keenness of pleasure and intellectual acquisition that shames us who have all our senses in their fullness.  Think of her patient, unremitting delving, of the digging up, up, up to get to the light which most human beings are privileged to enjoy with no effort at all!  The mind that accepts this wealth with no thought, no sense of responsibility, is a trifler with riches that are about us for God-given purposes.  Think of the way in which Stevenson and John Richard Green and George Eliot rose above their ill-health and did their work in despite of it!  Perhaps some of us have superb health and have never made any conscious effort to use that gift for a high end.