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125 
A whisper woke the air— 
A soft, light tone, and low— 
Yet barbed with shame and woe; 
Now, might it only perish there— 
No farther go. 
Ah, me! a quick and eager ear 
Caught up the little moaning sound ; 
Another voice hath breathed it clear, 
And so it wandered round 
From ear to lip, from lip to ear, 
Until it reached a gentle heart, 
And that—it broke ! 
It was the only heart it found, 
The only heart ’twas meant to find, 
When first its accents woke ; 
It reached that tender heart at last, 
And that it broke. 
Low as it seemed to other ears, 
It came a thunder crash to hers— 
That fragile girl, so fair and gay, 
That guileless girl, so pure and true. 
’Tis said a lovely humming-bird, 
That in a fragrant lily lay, 
And dreamed the summer morn away, 
Was killed by but a gun’s report 
Some idle boy had fired in sport ! 
The very sound was death ! 
And thus her happy heart, that beat 
With love and hspe, so fast and sweet 
(Shrined in its lily, too ; 
For who the maid that knew 
But owned the delicate, flower-like 
grace 
Of her young form and face ?) 
When first that word her light heart 
heard, 
It fluttered like a frightened bird, 
Then shut its wings and sighed, 
And with a silent shudder—died ! 
enlighten the ignorant and innocent child. The 
child is under a vow to “ Never, never tell any one, 
especially mother,” and feels that she is growing ex¬ 
tremely wise; hut she is really receiving false im¬ 
pressions which it will take years to eradicate, and 
losing an innocence of mind, a purity of thought, 
which can never be regained. She may live to 
see the wrong and curse it; she may never see the 
wrong and let it curse her. We all know how 
easily some natures are balanced either to the 
right or wrong, and how slight an influence at a cer¬ 
tain time will prove “ the pebble in the streamlet 
scant ” which turns the course of a whole life. 
I wish I had the power to rouse the attention of 
rattle, the child grieves over her broken doll, the 
school girl has her pet sorrows that everybody laughs 
at, and farther on come the love troubles which are 
certainly heart-breaking. Through them all it is a 
comfort to have the privacy of one’s own room, where, 
secure from intrusion, we can fight our mental bat¬ 
tles or seek our needed quiet. Mothers, give your 
daughters a room to keep, to decorate, and to cry in. 
A SENSIBLE COLLEGE. 
GUARD WELL YOUR, 
DAUGHTERS. 
Your daughters should have rooms 
of their own. We know it is difficult 
in our cities, where every additional 
room in a house costs three or four 
dollars a month; but a mother, writ¬ 
ing on this subject, forcibly says : 
It often arises from Want of thought on the sub- 
and the wish to save the care of an extra 
room, that girls are put to sleep in the room with 
others, occasionally with hired help; but if a mo¬ 
ther could realize, as I do, the impure influence 
thus thrown about her child, she would endure 
any amount of toil and inconvenience rather than 
allow it. Of course there are exceptions—girls, pure- 
minded girls, who will be as careful of their woidb 
as the mother herself—but in too many cases every 
new hired girl brings a new lot of coarse stories 
and information, with which she is only too willing to 
Girls are admitted to the Iowa Agricultural Col¬ 
lege and taught all sorts of queer and absurd things. 
For instance, the authorities there have the funny 
notion that girls ought to know how 
to cook! Every girl in the junior 
class has learned how to make good 
bread; weighing and measuring her 
ingredients, mixing and kneading 
and baking, and regulating her fire. 
Each has also been taught to make 
yeast and bake biscuit, pudding, pie, 
and cake of various kinds; how to 
cook a roast, to broil a steak, and 
make a fragrant cup of coffee ; how 
to stuff a turkey, make oyster soup, 
prepare stock for other soups, steam 
and mash potatoes so that they will 
melt in the mouth, and, in short, to 
get up a first-class meal, combining 
both substantial and fancy dishes, 
in good style. Theory and manual 
skill have gone hand-in-hand. Vast 
stores of learning have been ac¬ 
cumulated in the arts of canning, 
preserving, and pickling fruit, and 
they have taken practical lessons in 
all the details of household manage¬ 
ment, such as house-furnishing, care 
of beds and bedding, washing and 
ironing, care of the sick, and numer¬ 
ous other things. It is not stated 
whether girls are taught how to get 
up in the morning and build fires, 
but no doubt such a useful branch of 
information receives the attention its 
importance demands. 
Sly Puss. 
every woman who has a girl entrusted to her care, 
and make her see, as I have seen, the great evil of 
the slight and apparently unimportant habit. I have 
mentioned the main reason why the intimacy aris¬ 
ing from the sharing of a room should be avoided, 
but there are other reasons why a young girl should 
have a room of her own. She will learn to keep it 
in order, to arrange it tastefully, and take pride in 
collecting within it her little treasures. Then, too, 
we are apt to think that no season of life except our 
own present one contains any real trials; but they 
are scattered all along. The infant cries for its lost 
m 
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A fanciful theory is broached by 
an Englishman with regard to the 
effect of sound on the growth of 
plants. It is stated by the writer 
that, having built a small conserva¬ 
tory in a barren locality, he attempted the cul¬ 
tivation of roses and other plants under shelter. 
They did not thrive well, however, ( until he hap¬ 
pened to remove an harmonium into the green¬ 
house, and, practising on it steadily for some months, 
was surprised to see a gradual but rapid recovery of 
health on the part of his plants. From this circum¬ 
stance he has elaborated the hypothesis that music is 
conducive to vegetable health and life. 
Rose-Grubs. —If there are any grubs in stems of 
roses run a fine wire into their holes and kill them. 
