what angel wakes me from my flowery bed?

happy midsummer, my lovelies!

i'll follow you, i'll lead you about a round,
through bog, through bush, through brake, through briar;
sometime a horse i'll be, sometime a hound,
a hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;
and neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.

value judgements: i'm a bad person.

Alas! the boys only have had the benefit of that well-known juvenile apophthegm, that
"Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do:" it has never crossed the parents' minds that the rhyme could apply to the delicate digital extremities of the daughters.

And so their whole energies are devoted to the massacre of old Time. They prick him to death with crochet and embroidery needles; strum him deaf with piano and harp playing--not music; cut him up with morning-visitors, or leave his carcass in ten-minute parcels at every "friend's" house they can think of. Finally, they dance him defunct at all sort of unnatural hours; and then, rejoicing in the excellent excuse, smother him in sleep for a third of the following day.

Thus he dies, a slow, inoffensive, perfectly natural death; and they will never recognise his murder till, on the confines of this world, or from the unknown shores of the next, the question meets them: "What have you done with Time?"--Time, the only mortal gift bestowed equally on every living soul, and, excepting the soul, the only mortal loss which is totally irretrievable.

Yet this great sin, this irredeemable loss, in many women arises from pure ignorance. Men are taught as a matter of business to recognise the value of time, to apportion and employ it: women rarely or never. The most of them have no definite appreciation of the article as a tangible divisible commodity at all. They would laugh at a mantua-maker who cut up a dress-length into trimmings, and then expected to make out of two yards of silk a full skirt. Yet that the same laws of proportion should apply to time and its measurements--that you cannot dawdle away a whole forenoon, and then attempt to cram into the afternoon the entire business of the day--that every minute's unpunctuality constitutes a debt or a theft (lucky, indeed, if you yourself are the only party robbed or made creditor thereof!): these slight facts rarely seem to cross the feminine imagination.

It is not their fault; they have never been "accustomed to business." They hear that with men "time is money;" but it never strikes them that the same commodity, equally theirs, is to them not money, perhaps, but life--life in its highest form and noblest uses--life bestowed upon every human being, distinctly and individually, without reference to any other being, and for which every one of us, married or unmarried, woman as well as man, will assuredly be held accountable before God.

My young-lady friends, of from seventeen upwards, your time, and the use of it, is as essential to you as to any father or brother of you all. You are accountable for it just as much as he is. If you waste it, you waste not only your substance, but your very souls--not that which is your own, but your Maker's.

what am i doing with my life?

i want to run away after graduation, just for a little while. i'd go for a year, perhaps.

pick a city or three, please; tell me why i should go there. (american cities need not apply.)