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 If you fail, you must pay your own way home. And what is more, you will not be told why you failed!

Now the word comes that you are to report for duty. Pack your trunk carefully, not failing to put in a stout little strong-box with a padlock, for the superintendent assumes no responsibility for your property unless you place money, rings, etc., in the office safe, and you are away from your room or dormitory most of the time.

On reaching the city where the training-school is located do not go to a hotel, and then, with the air of conferring a favor, write to the superintendent that you are in town and ready to come at her call. She has called you. Go directly to the hospital—and drop your individuality on its front stoop. From the moment you enter you are a mere cog in this great machine of alleviation and mercy.

Just here let me tell you an incident in the first day of school of a now successful nurse. She entered the tiny room assigned to her on the top floor of the dormitory building, flung her suitcase, her umbrella, magazine, etc., on the narrow bed and seated herself thereon to remove her hat and veil. She was just tucking the latter into her diminutive locker, when—enter the superintendent of nurses! This per-


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 sonage gave a quick glance at the bed and remarked:

"Why, really, it looks as if some one had been sitting on that bed."

"Yes, Miss Blank," replied Miss Innocence, "I have."

"Never do it again. Once a bed is made up, nothing should be laid on it, not even a handkerchief."

Do you begin to understand that the régime is not cruel, but strict? Little blunders might cost a human life. There must be no such word as "forget" in your vocabulary. Neither must you ever say "Why?" Just do as you are told. You are not there to improve the system of the management. It has been all tried out, perhaps before you were born. For the time being you are a nonentity, whose sole duty is to obey implicitly, unquestioningly.

Every one is watching you. You are surrounded by spies who study your every movement. They will notice the lace stock that ought to be plain linen, and the raveling from your petticoat that should never have found its way to a hospital training-school. They will peer into your bureau drawers merely to see in what order you keep your personal belongings, and some one will go into your room every morning to make sure that you tidied it perfectly before going to breakfast or on duty.

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 Many girls ask what is expected of a probationer in the way of actual work. During the period of probation will they be given a fair test of their ability?

The following program of the first eight weeks' work laid out for probationers in a New England hospital will convey some idea of the scope and nature of the work:

"Hospital etiquette and rules, nurses' ethics; washing, nourishment dishes, care of refrigerators, gas-stoves, cupboards, trays, serving meals, nourishment; care of lavatory and utensils in lavatory; bed-making; bed bath; patients' morning and evening toilets; admitting stretcher cases, undressing patients, entrance bath, listing and care of clothing and valuables; filling and applying ice-caps, hot-water bags; care of linen press; washing hair, care of back, mouth, teeth, etc.; feeding helpless patients; taking and recording temperatures, pulse and respiration; mustard plasters, poultices, etc.; giving of medicines; special class instruction in printing, charting and diets."

Once you have proven your worth as a probationer, and are accepted as a student nurse, you virtually turn yourself and your services over to a hospital for a term varying from two to three years. During that time you will be provided with lodging, food and care in case of illness. Hither your uniforms, laundry and


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 text-books will be provided or you will receive a small allowance which will cover these expenses. Your hours will be practically twelve a day, with brief respites during each day for outdoor exercise, a half-holiday each week, and generally half of each Sunday. Two weeks' vacation is granted during the summer. You will live at the home for nurses connected with the hospital and will be subject to its rules and regulations, precisely as if you were a hospital patient instead of a nurse.

If you are unwilling to give up this much time, this much strength, this much liberty, to prepare for the profession, do not aim to be a trained nurse. Nothing short of this will prepare you.

It seems hardly necessary to outline the career of a nurse after graduation, but as many girls desire such particulars, I will add that in cities of any size the graduate nurse who has aroused the favorable interest of physicians connected with the hospital seldom lacks work at $25 a week. On the other hand, experienced nurses declare that the work is so exacting and so wearing, physically and nervously, that no graduate nurse should attempt to work more than ten months in a year, which means that her cash income will be a thousand dollars a year. Her board is of course included wherever she nurses, but she generally maintains a resi-


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 dence in some registry or good rooming house. Her uniforms and laundry form a heavy item of expense.

Graduate nurses do not always take up general practice, but may secure positions on hospital staffs, perhaps in the very school from which they have just graduated, or in smaller out-of-town hospitals. All large State institutions and private charities employ trained nurses. This list includes houses of correction and refuge, asylums and homes for crippled, blind and mentally defective children, homes for the aged, and large schools where the nurse works under the matron. Factories and department stores also employ nurses to guardthe general health of employees and act in case of accident. In many cities the Board of Education maintains a corps of nurses, health departments also give them employment, and nearly every large city has its visiting nurses. The highest salaried posts are those of superintendents in hospitals and sanitariums, but experienced nurses agree that a period of general practice is desirable as preparation for any salaried position in an institution.

If you cannot take a complete course, and you are still determined to work for the sick, then you must select different lines from those followed by the trained nurse. You may become what is known as a convalescent nurse, or


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 a trained nursemaid, or you can specialize on massage or cookery for the sick, or you can make a business of reading aloud to the sick. But do not imagine for one instant that among doctors you will have the same standing as the trained nurse, nor will you command the same income.

Several organizations, notably the Young Women's Christian Association in large cities, offer courses in convalescent nursing. In this course you are prepared to take the place of the trained nurse, when the patient is so close to recovery that scientific vigilance may be relaxed and mere attendance and entertainment substituted. Convalescent nurses are employed to relieve trained nurses while the latter take their daily outdoor exercises; also in some households to wait upon chronic invalids who have become fretful and captious, and who require diversion as well as light attendance. Work of this sort is secured through registries and physicians, and pays from seven to fifteen dollars a week, according to the amount of attendance and work required.

Trained nursemaids are now in great demand in the nurseries of the rich. They step into the shoes of the trained nurse, take complete charge of the new baby in the household and often assume direction of the nursery complete, order-


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 ing the meals, and guarding the health of the older children. In such instances there is generally an under-maid who performs the menial nursery duties. The semi-trained nurse wears a uniform and is a sort of upper servant in the household. Her salary varies from twenty to thirty dollars a month, together with board, lodging and laundry, according to her duties and training. Such training is secured in charity hospitals for babies, and the course runs from six to nine months. The responsibilities, however, are very great, as the woman who employs a semi-trained nurse generally has many outside interests and throws all responsibilities upon her employee.

An expert masseuse can build up a good business in this day of nervous womanhood, of high-strung society women and overworked professional and business women. Hither the Swedish system of massage or the Weir Mitchell system, physicians say, should be mastered by the masseuse who expects to succeed. Both require many months of study, superb strength and that peculiar quality of personal magnetism which makes the exhausted patient respond to the efforts of her masseuse. A masseuse is paid by the hour or by the treatment, and secures work through physicians, registries for nurses, sanitariums, Turkish baths and beauty


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 parlors, where nervously exhausted women go to recuperate.

General massage is taught in all hospital training-schools, but the specialist should take private instruction from scientific experts.


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a work of this sort, when discussing art as a means of livelihood, we must consider it as a practical profession, not as a divine gift or inspiration. This book is written for the girl who must become economically independent within two years at least. For that reason we will not consider the training, environment and work of the girl who aspires to portraiture, miniature-painting, or oil and water-color masterpieces of that moving character which represent the highest type of the fine arts, and which require years of patient work, to say nothing of more or less genius. Such girls must either have enough funds to study for years in the best ateliers of America and Europe or they must be willing to wage an indefinite warfare against poverty and discouragement.

There are comparatively few girls in America possessed of such boundless ambition and persistency, but there are thousands of young women who show decided artistic talent, and


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 who realize that they must either turn this gift to practical financial account or look to other avenues of money-making. Nor is there any reason why a girl, who can afford a few years of hard work in a good school, should hesitate—to develop her one talent along artistic lines. "The practical worker in any line of artistic endeavor can find a market for her wares or a salaried position, but she must not fail to place due emphasis on that little word "practical." The man who stands ready to pay for artistic products wants his art-workers to be as business-like as his stenographers or salesmen. The day of the lackadaisical maiden with unkempt locks, bedraggled skirts and dreamy eyes staring into the blue heavens for an inspiration, are past, so far as the publishing and manufacturing world is concerned. While such a girl waits for an inspiration, a practical worker with perhaps less artistic ideals, but a keener appreciation of her employer's needs and the importance of punctuality, secures all the orders.

In other words, the girl who imagines that she can put her artistic talent to account must start out aright, with a perfect understanding of the business-like atmosphere in which she will work. She will have to work regularly, not spasmodically. She will have to deliver her product on time—or have the order canceled. And she will have to deliver the sort of work


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 her employer orders. She cannot substitute some sudden, inspirational idea. If she is one of those rare creatures, a genius, an iconoclast in art, if she must do things in her own way or not at all, then she must not enter what we may term the field of commercial art.

Broadly speaking, girls who want to earn their living by pencil, pen or brush may be divided into two classes: those who wish to work in their own homes, and those who can and will fare forth in search of work and salaried positions. The resident of a large city, like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago or San Francisco, naturally has the advantage over the girl in a smaller city or village or on a farm. She can do the most practical forms of art work, such as designing for textiles and metals, fashion drawings, book covers and illustrating, and still live at home, while the girl living far from an art, manufacturing or publishing center must leave home to gain practical experience and to make her reputation.

The girl with the brush who cannot make this change in residence must cultivate her talents so as to use them in her environment. Only one girl in a thousand can establish herself as an art-worker through correspondence. This does not apply to high-grade illustrators, many of whom prefer to work far from publishing centers, but to girls who wish to secure regular


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 work, perhaps salaried positions as designers along some particular line. Designing of jewelry is generally done in the manufacturing plants, managers of fashion syndicates or fashion magazines want illustrators to work under their direction, even makers of wallpaper or carpet patterns must be near enough to the factory to confer constantly with those who use their designs.

This explanation is made at the very beginning of the chapter because so few girls from farms, small towns and inland cities appreciate the importance of being on the ground to market their wares, or the vital necessity of making their work practical and utilitarian. Many girls imagine that they can take an art course by correspondence and put city girls out of business with the designs they will be turning out in a few months. While I think the correspondence course is a boon to the isolated girl with artistic talent, I want each of these girls to understand that the day will come when she will realize the stern necessity of direct teaching and of being in the market with her wares.

We will discuss first the future of the girl who is about to graduate from the high school, who has displayed considerable talent with her pencil or brush, and who can afford to give at least two years to the study of art.

She may become either an instructor or a


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 worker. If teaching appeals to her, if she has the natural pedagogical instinct, she will succeed either in a salaried position or as a private instructor. But if she is the sort of girl who demands practical results of her own hands, if her tastes are mechanical rather than theoretical, if she is happiest when working alone and watching the work come out from under her pencil, then she will secure the best results and find the surest avenue to contentment as a designer, illustrator or worker in arts and crafts. No girl should select a course of art until she has given this problem earnest consideration and has decided on the use to which she will put her knowledge. Much time and money can be saved by settling this question in advance, and selecting the most expeditious or practical course of training. To be sure, a change of mind and heart may come after the student begins to work at an art school, but as a rule a high-school graduate is able to decide whether she will find her greatest happiness and usefulness as a teacher or as a worker. The girl who "hates the schoolroom" and has no natural interest in children or power to attract them, will succeed much better as a worker along the more practical art lines than as an instructor in either public schools or private classes.

As the girl inexperienced in the business world knows little of art work which has a com-


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 mercial value in manufacturing plants or publishing houses, we will discuss first these methods of money-making.

Among the courses offered to girls desiring to become practical workers are the following: General art, drawing, painting and illustration, which lead to positions as staff illustrators on newspapers and magazines, or free-lancing as an illustrator; decorative and applied design which leads to practical designing for book covers, pages and illumination; stencils, silks, damasks, rugs, wall-papers and wall coverings of all sorts, lamps, candlesticks, grilles, stained glass windows, mosaics, carvings, furniture, etc.; interior decoration or architecture, either of which lead to positions with architects or interior decorators and eventually to an independent venture; and the course in jewelry, metal chasing, enameling and medal work which leads to salaried positions or good prices for individual designs with jewelry and arts and crafts manufacturers.

The time required for training varies from two to four years, according to the school selected and the work done by the student. At an endowed institution where no specific time is set for the completion of the courses, one pupil will secure a position at the end of two years and prove a satisfactory worker, while the girl who started at her side will work in the school two


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 years longer, and then start at a lower salary than her more ambitious and earnest fellow-worker student.

The course in general art work, leading to illustration at the Cooper Institute, New York City, runs four years, yet a girl who had studied only eighteen months, met with financial reverses, entered the offices of a fashion syndicate and under the practical direction of its manager whipped her somewhat crude work into practical shape, with just the dash of originality which is sometimes born of desperation. Within a month she was earning fifteen dollars a week. To-day she is head of the illustrated fashion department of a magazine for women, and is drawing a very comfortable salary.

The girl who can take up the study of art as her sister may be studying stenography, closing her ears to the call of Bohemia, and working as if she were engaged in a trade at which she must serve a stern apprenticeship, need not dawdle away four years of youth, energy and family funds. Her work will be marketable not when the school hands her a diploma, but when it has a practical market value.

From this you must not think that I advise hasty, superficial work. What menaces the success of the average out-of-town girl sent to a city art school by her parents, is misconstruing that famous line: "Art is long and time is


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 fleeting." She thinks she must take indefinite time to study and gain inspiration, when steady, regular, concentrated work is far more important than what she terms a "gradual growth."

There was a time when students were urged not to draw fashions or enter the services of any syndicate which supplies cheap magazines with head and tail-pieces, fashions or pattern drawings and illustrations, but there has been a distinct change of sentiment on this question. The practical training received in the art rooms of such a syndicate and the education in the value of lines, light and shade, as seen in actual reproduction, are superior to that which can be secured in an art school where the work is never reproduced on either fast or slow presses. The few bad tricks or habits which a student may develop in the rush work of such a syndicate office are more than balanced by the practical results of seeing her work reproduced in newspaper or magazine.

Girls completing the course of illustration in a publishing or manufacturing center can find positions in publishing houses, as staff illustrators, particularly in fashions or pattern work, or making drawings for the advertising manager of department stores where illustrations are prepared for daily newspapers and periodicals, or in advertising agencies where catchy illustrations for exploiting proprietary


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 articles are always in demand; or if the worker has a particularly novel and fetching treatment of feminine foibles, she can secure a salary or space rates doing timely drawings for the daily papers, particularly the afternoon editions.

Another very profitable field for the illustrator who wants quick returns is catalogue work, illustrating the catalogues put out by high-grade manufacturers or wholesalers, Any girl who secures practical training along these cash-return lines will be laying up money and securing experience against the day when she feels artistically strong enough to branch out as an illustrator of stories and books. And furthermore, she may avoid many months spent in treading the valley of humiliation if she will do this more practical and yet artistic work, before storming the portals of big publishing houses.

The girl who selects decorative and applied design seldom secures a salaried position, for by the time she has completed this course she realizes that a design which is worth anything at all will bring a better figure as an individual creation than if she is employed on salary. Still there are manufacturing plants which employ artists on salary, and the girl who prefers a small but sure income will seek such work, ranging from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a week.

All the leading manufacturers of hand-made jewelry or specially designed objects of art,


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 medals, enameling, etc., employ women and pay good salaries, while women are succeeding not only as assistants, but as independent architects and interior decorators.

It is almost as hard to give a scale of salaries or earnings for art workers as it is to state how much time they must expend in preparation. With both questions the answer depends upon the girl. There are patient, conscientious, but mechanical workers, drawing fashion designs in New York art rooms at twenty dollars a week, while less conscientious workers with more originality and that rare offering to a harried editor, an idea, are drawing fifty, sixty or even seventy-five dollars a week, making near-caricatures of their own sex or drawing charmingly impossible little ladies for metropolitan dailies.

There are girls patiently redrawing plans and specifications for men architects with ideas, for fifteen dollars a week, while right across the street a woman who can conceive, as well as reproduce, ideas earns her ten thousand a year designing depots and business blocks of the most utilitarian sort.

There are girls who studied interior decoration from composition and color to sanitary science and electricity, but, because they lack originality and business or administrative ability, they are working on a salary of fifteen dollars a week, while a fellow-student with ex-


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 ecutive ability and push has her own business and is furnishing and decorating clubhouses, hotels and private homes.

Mere training in the best school of America will not turn out financially successful workers. It may develop an artistic, finished workwoman, but it cannot train her to make money. She must prove her business or economic worth by the manner in which she markets her wares.

The cost of such an art training varies. A girl can spend a thousand dollars a year for tuition, studio rent and living expenses while attending a New York art school, or she can study at Cooper Institute for a nominal figure, two hundred dollars a year covering her expenses, light-housekeeping, tuition and incidentals. Or she can work by day and study free at night schools.

The would-be art teacher must outline her course of study with infinite care, as the position she secures will depend not so much upon her ability, however important that may be, as upon her diploma and the name of the institution from which she graduates. Before selecting the course, let her decide upon the sort of position she expects to fill. If she intends to become a teacher in a fashionable private school or to rise to the post of teacher of art in the high school or supervisor of art in the city public schools, then she might as well decide at once


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 that she must have a college degree, such as is furnished by Teachers College, Columbia University, or a normal training course of equal standing. This will represent at least two years' work in what is known as a normal art and manual training course, in addition to the regular, high school course of four years. The two years' normal work will cost, including living expenses and tuition, about one thousand dollars. If she intends to become a teacher in the graded schools, a normal course, added to the regulation high school course, with specialization in drawing, will be sufficient.

Special teachers of drawing are paid from seven hundred dollars a year up, the teacher of drawing in a high school never receives less than one thousand dollars per year, and a supervisor is paid from twelve hundred a year up, according to the size of the city and the scale of teachers' salaries.

In conclusion, a few words to the girl who cannot take a comprehensive course, either as a practical art worker or as a teacher, and who must earn money in her home town, perhaps in her own parlor. Only one girl in a thousand can study at home, remain at home and still market her wares in a distant art or manufacturing center. The thousandth girl is a born illustrator, whose work compels the attention of art editors. Even then, eventually, she must


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 make frequent trips to publishing centers. Or if she is a worker along the more practical lines, she turns out such original designs in arts and crafts wares, china painting, stenciling, etc., that proprietors of exclusive shops are forced to notice her work, even though she may not be able to confer with them in person. But the thousandth girl is not the average girl, and that is why managers of art stationery stores, women's exchanges, and art shops, and private individuals whose names appear in public print are literally deluged with impossible handwork from trained and untrained art-workers in smaller cities and villages. Their output includes crude hand-painted china, satin cushiontops, pincushions, menus, favors, place cards and postals, not original, but copied from lithographs which sell for a mere song.

These workers cannot find a market in a distant city. They must seek patrons and work up trade in their own towns or adjacent cities, where they can ascertain what women with money wish to purchase. The crude oil painting of a basket of peaches which won first prize at the county fair may sell to one of the judges, but the city art dealer handles only work by a man or woman with reputation. The pretty trinkets made of birchbark or the postals with scenes of the local pleasure resorts or monuments will sell to tourists visiting the artist's


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 town, but they will not appeal to the buyer for an art stationery store a thousand or two thousand miles away.

The young woman with mediocre talent—and she will soon find her level if she goes to a large city and competes with original workers—will do best in her own town, organizing classes for young girls who want to paint Christmas and birthday gifts, holding Easter and Christmas sales, making up souvenirs for tourists, and creating a demand among local social leaders for hand-painted prizes and favors. If she can build up a reputation for introducing into her community the latest fads of metropolitan society, she will soon have an established home trade and a certain income which she can never secure by dealing with city merchants or exchanges, through the mails.


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is a trade of the veriest drudgery at a small weekly wage, or it is a commercial venture which yields very big financial returns. There is no middle ground.

On its altar many a conscientious woman has sacrificed youth, girlish happiness and health. Upon woman's fondness for dress and innate American extravagance, other women have built a competence. Dressmaking will yield large financial returns only to the woman who has the true business or commercial instinct, and who would succeed equally well if she opened a millinery shop, managed a shoe factory, or ran a public typewriting office.

The mere fact that you set dainty stitches will not make you a financial success as a dressmaker. You must have what is known as a "business head." Here is a case in point, rather personal, to be sure, but one for whose truth I can vouch.

During my last year in school manual


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 was just beginning to invade educational circles, and I belonged to what was perhaps the first sewing-class in the high school of a large Eastern city. In September we started setting stitches, sewing seams and making buttonholes. By commencement day, in June, we were expected to be able to cut, fit and make a garment. My dainty stitches and accurate work in the sewing-class helped materially to raise my general average. In fact, my neatly-made percale dress was awarded the highest possible percentage, but later in the summer, when I tried to wear that dress, it looked—well, in a kindly spirit, we will call it queer.

In the same class, almost rubbing elbows with me, was a girl whose sewing nearly drove our dear old teacher distracted. Her stitches wandered over the material at their own sweet will. Her buttonholes were a class scandal. Her garment fell to pieces, unless some of us helped to fasten off the thread-ends. But the little mull dress which she made for her graduation stunt was distractingly dainty, albeit none of us could vouch for the steadfastness of its seams. She was marked very low by the conscientious judges of needlework, but later in the summer, on the boardwalk at Cape May, N. J., that little frock added several scalps to her proposal belt.

A few years later that girl opened a profit-


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 able dressmaking establishment, though she had to hire women to set the stichesstitches [sic] according to her designs. Later she became buyer for a firm, making semi-annual trips abroad. To-day she is head of a fashion and pattern syndicate,—enjoying a large income, and she is wonderfully happy and satisfied in her work. I might still be making very neat buttonholes in her dressmaking establishment, but if I want an artistic corsage-bow or a smart summer girdle evolved from ribbon, I have to tip a girl at the ribbon counter to make it for me. So you see the girl who received the highest percentage as a mere setter of stitches might have starved, or at least become a tired drudge at dressmaking, while the girl who knew the value of lines, color combinations and effects, although she did make round and ragged buttonholes, has a thriving business, built on the same trade.

There is a small, steady income in ordinary dressmaking. You can make a trifle more than wages if you are a neat seamstress and have good health. But the big money in dressmaking is made by the women who know how to profit by the labor of others, who can catch and hold trade by their original designs, and who are sincerely interested in making their wealthy customers look their best. Make a woman better-looking, whether by massage,, millinery or dressmaking, and


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 raw travesties atoned for and brought into keeping by the lovely phrase (on the violin) with which Beethoven has bound them together and made them one with the music which comes before and after them." But this "joke" view has not been shared by other critics of note. Teetgen writes poetically:

"At last the brook is still, the trees rustle no more: we have already once said farewell to the soft babbling that long kept us spell-bound. Quail, cuckoo, and nightingale are alone still heard.Beautifully imagined! as it were also saying 'farewell' to the sympathetic wanderer up the vale; who, only another human form of them, had stayed so long with them, loving them like their brother, enchanted by their songenchanted in Nature's bosom."

An American critic dissects the passage more coldly:

"Neither the nightingale, the quail, nor the cuckoo sings precisely thus. The nightingale does not imitate itself in the proportions of the musical scale; it only makes itself heard by inappreciable or variable sounds, and cannot be imitated by instruments of fixed intervals and absolute pitch. The quail has been well rendered as to its usual rhythm, but not in relation to its pitch and quality. As to the cuckoo, it gives the minor third, not the major."

At the conclusion of the opening movement of this symphony the flute is given a very dainty and characteristic ascending passage, the rest of the orchestra being , Pastorale Symphony.


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 the laborer will be considered worthy of her hire.

We will take it for granted that you have fairly good health, strong eyesight, a gift for setting neat stitches and running a machine evenly, and a fair amount of good taste. You think you would like to be a dressmaker, but you have no capital.

You must start as an apprentice or helper, according to your age. If you are a mere slip of a girl, you will start your dressmaking career by running errands, delivering finished work, executing small shopping commissions, and holding a box of pins for the fitter. All of those tasks hold possibilities. Running errands and delivering work will bring you in direct contact with customers and give to you your first training in tactful treatment of patrons. The shopping commissions will prove lessons in values, combinations of color, or of fabrics and trimmings, and the retail markets. By watching the fitter closely, the mere holder of pins gains her first idea of the value of lines and what constitutes failure or success in fitting.

As an errand girl, the apprentice will not re'ceive more than $2 a week. She may have to work several months for nothing. At the end of six months she starts on linings at $4 a week. When promoted to do over-sewing and finishing, she will receive $6 for her week's work.


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 Trimmers on skirts or waists receive $12 to $14 per week. In cities, fitters receive from $15 to $18. After a few years in the establishment of a first-class dressmaker, if the employee has a little reserve fund, a list of probable patrons, the gift of winning satisfied customers and plenty of good courage, she is ready to open a shop of her own.

The girl who lacks business push on a the ability to take the initiative and achieve on original lines should not attempt an independent venture. She can always find a position for about nine months out of the year, perhaps more, at $15 a week in a private dressmaking establishment, or she can enter a department store as alteration fitter in the suit and coat department.

So much for the history of the young girl. Now for her older sister or aunt, who is a fine needlewoman, but who has no knowledge of cutting, fitting or designing. She must enter a shop where the best custom work is done and where her fine stitching will be worth at least a dollar a day to her employer. This means hand-tucking, binding, braiding, etc. Then she advances to the work of trimming and finally to fitting. She escapes only the errand-running and shopping, though if she can get a little of the latter to do, it is good training for her.

Replying to the many questions about schools,


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 I would say that the girl who has it in her to succeed will do so whether she starts as an apprentice at nothing a week, or spends her father's money at a high-priced school for dressmakers. The teachers in a school are perhaps more considerate of your feelings, at so much per week, than the forewoman of the shop who is intrusting to your inexperienced fingers fabrics purchased by her patrons, but the consideration paid for by your father's money will not lead to any royal road in dressmaking lore. That is either born in you, a God-given talent, or you acquire it by honest effort.

Studying designing during the slack season is entirely different. A practical fitter or would-be designer will find a summer or evening course in a good art school most helpful.

It will depend upon yourself how soon you can learn the trade. Forewomen tell me that it takes so many months to perfect oneself on linings, on sleeves, on skirts, on trimmings, but I know that girls who have the right sort of determination and who concentrate on their work can break every time-rule which forewomen have conceived. But when the demon of discouragement takes possession of you, then your chances of emancipation and independence fades.

In selecting a shop in which to work, choose a small rather than a large establishment. This


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 will insure individual attention, or correction, you may call it, and a chance to work on all parts of a gown. In the large shops you are apt to settle down as a maker of sleeves, or vests or panels, some one part of each gown always being turned over to you. Thus your general training is neglected.

Now we will say that you have a fair working knowledge of dressmaking, fitting and designing. You want to be an independent, not a salaried worker. By this I mean that either you wish to establish a house-to-house clientele of your own or a shop with help to execute your orders and carry out your designs. Right here I want to speak of your health. Barring teaching, I doubt if there is another trade or profession which holds so many wrecks, nervous and physical, as dressmaking. This condition exists because the work is confining. In the busy season, dressmakers do not leave their workrooms for weeks at a time, and then they wonder why they have headaches, digestive disorders, neuralgia and nervous prostration. The woman who means to last in this trade must guard her health. A brisk walk night and morning, proper ventilation of the workrooms, regular hours for meals, and relaxation, downright fun after working hours, will save your reason, protect your health, lengthen your period of


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 usefulness to your own sex, and increase your bank account.

Do not expect to defy every rule of hygiene—and sanitation, for many workrooms are unsanitary and germ-laden—and then achieve success and prosperity. Mix a little common sense with your ability to build good gowns, if you have no capital with which to open a shop which will appeal to wealthy customers, and you still wish to be your own mistress and paymaster, then you must specialize—and right here I want to picture some incidents from real dressmaking life in which girls have literally wrenched success from apparent failure by specializing, or creating a demand for their services.

In a city of less than thirty thousand inhabitants there works a young woman who calls herself dressmaker to little people. She makes garments of any sort for children over two and under ten. She would not make a shirt-waist for little Tommy's mother, nor a skirt for Baby Bess' grown-up sister, because she frankly admits that she does not know how. But she makes the cutest little brown-linen suits for Tommy in which he can play comfortably and yet look well dressed, because they fit properly; and she makes Baby Bess the cynosure of feminine eyes when she goes calling or to church with her proud mamma. Moreover, she is paid two dol-


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 lars a day, and has to fight for a month's vacation during hot weather.

Here was a girl who from childhood could set neat stitches and was accurate. She started to serve an apprenticeship with a dressmaker in her own city. She saw girls break down from close confinement in a poorly-ventilated workroom. She watched her employer's nerves quiver under the trials peculiar to dealing with women customers, and the effort to keep promises which never should have been made. The girl decided that she did not want to be a dressmaker, yet she had to earn her living.

She heard some mothers complaining of how poorly ready-to-wear clothes-for children were put together, and how tiresome it was to do your own sewing. The girl saw her chance and seized it. She offered her services at a dollar a day as a seamstress, working on children's clothes under the direction of the mothers who were glad to have a neat assistant. Then she read up on children's clothes. She bought patterns from various firms until she found one that specialized on raiment for children. She began to design a little frock here, a boy's blouse there. She studied as she sewed, and gradually she could ask a slight advance in her wages. In time mothers found that this girl, whom they had trained and whose faculty for absorbing information had been as rapid as it


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 has been unostentatious, was a specialist in juvenile raiment.

Perhaps some day she will be the proud possessor of a large city shop, because men of money, and women, too, for that matter, are often willing to back a specialist of this sort. Perhaps, being a woman of quiet tastes and simple habits, she may continue to live contentedly on twelve dollars a week. But, best of all, she loves her work and has steady nerves, which means something to those of us who are wage-earners.

Some years ago there came to New York from the Far West, from New Mexico, if I remember correctly, a young woman who painted rather well on china. She opened a studio, but met with indifferent sucess. Finally a day came when she could buy no more china to paint and fire, but that mattered very little, as her stock of finished wares was by no means depleted. Still, her hands must have something td do, so she began to make over her clothes and to ultilize some discarded garments given to her by a well-to-do patron. Among the latter was a green crepe de chine frock, which she cleaned, embroidered in self-tones, and made into a most effective blouse. The patron, calling at the studio one day, could hardly believe her eyes when she was shown the blouse. If she could only find some one who could clean, make over


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 and utilize out-of-date clothes for her in that very artistic fashion!

The girl hesitated a moment, then frankly asked for a chance to do the work, explaining her financial condition. The one-time buyer of ceramics gladly accepted her services as a renovator, cleaner and general utility sewer.

For one whole year that girl did nothing but make old frocks into new ones. There was nothing about cleaning, turning and pressing that she did not master. But all the time she cherished another ambition. At the end of the year she entered the workroom of a firm noted as makers of women's shirt-waists and blouses. She studied their methods, and finally fared forth a specialist in shirt-waist and lingerie blouses. To-day she has a business so thriving that she never gives a thought to her one-time ambition as a painter of china.

From the West Indies came another young woman with rosy visions of learning dressmaking and opening an establishment of her own. She found herself an apprentice in a huge workroom surrounded by girls who had no ambition beyond half-holidays and Sunday at Coney Island. They told her there was no chance to rise. If a forewoman saw you were clever she purposely kept you back, lest you become her rival.

The girl could not endure this. She needed


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 an ambition to sustain her, an objective point toward which she would bend her endeavors. As soon as she felt sufficient confidence, she left the shop and started as house-to-house seamstress at one dollar per day. Sometimes she worked with members of the family who employed her, sometimes with more competent house-to-house dressmakers, but it did not take her long to discover that the problem of the average family was the gowning of the girl who had just reached the awkward age, the age of angles and of hysterical tears over dresses that would not simulate curves.

She began to study the possibilities of the awkward age. What styles of skirts, blouses, girdles and fichus would soften those angles? What fabrics lent themselves best to soft effects, and what trimmings should be avoided? What changes could be made in prevailing style to secure becoming results for unhappy Miss Fifteen? All these problems she studied and worked out with a more than artistic eye—the enthusiasm of the girl with the one idea. To-day that girl commands $2.50 per day. She has all she can do in town during the winter, spring and fall, and her hot-weather days are spent at a resort on the New Jersey coast, where in two wealthy families she makes, early fall finery for growing girls. Thus she has her expenses paid to and from the resort, her daily


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 dip in the sea, her moonlight nights on the sand, her afternoon rest, when the machine no longer whirrs and the scissors lie as idle as their mistress. These privileges are hers, not because she knows a trade, for many of us have a trade and no privileges, but because she has found for herself a special service. She is doing something that few, if any, other women have deemed worthy their attention. She has made a niche for herself.

These instances of successful effort have not been recited for your amusement. I hope they have all gone to prove that it is not the trade, but the use to which you put it, that makes for contentment or big financial returns.

Perhaps you think from what I have written that training, or serving an apprenticeship, is not necessary, that somehow you can escape the monotony of preparation; but I did not wish to give you this impression. In each instance the girl served a hard apprenticeship either before or after entering business for herself. The maker of blouses served a long weary year in a waist factory. The builder of garments for children or of raiment for growing girls founded her individual success on a knowledge of cutting and sewing gained in the hard school of experience.

What I do want to set forth in this article is that the girl who thinks she has only to follow


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 unthinkingly the orders of her employer or forewoman, and who does not plan definitely and enthusiastically for her future, will remain as long as she lives either a workroom drudge or a most indifferent dressmaker to dissatisfied customers.


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all fields in which to sow her energies, the well-educated but otherwise untrained girl who suddenly faces the problem of self-support will find the modern library the most promising. So far the profession is not overcrowded, and the good worker is in demand.

It is a field open alike to the graduate of college, finishing school or high school, but it is absolutely closed to the girl who barely managed to pull through the graded schools, and who, through either force of circumstances or inclination, stopped when she acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the English branches. It is an ideal field for the woman who is intellectual, yet lacks ability to express this intellectuality in literary form. It often proves a most profitable and pleasant field for the teacher of methodical habits, good education and bookish tastes, who somehow lacks the gift of disciplining and instilling knowledge in the youthful mind.

But it is not the field for that common type


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 of girl who likes books, yet is not a student, who imagines that in the library she may familiarize herself with such books as please her fancy, and ignore those which do not appeal, and pictures herself exchanging books during the busy hours and reading the new novels when visitors are few.

In the modern library there are no idle hours, no slack days. There is always something to be done. There is always more to be learned.

The delicate woman who wants "ladylike employment and genteel hours" should avoid library work, but if any girl is earnestly seeking a profession in which she may rise by her own merits and through her own industry, broaden her mental life by constant association with the best in literature, and at the same time do something for her fellow men, she will find such work in the public library.

The circular of information concerning the training-school for children's librarians, conducted in connection with the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh, Pa., states:

"The library of to-day does not wait for the people to come to it; it goes to them, carrying books into schools and homes. A large share of this work belongs to the children's librarian, whose function it is to awaken an interest in good reading in as many children as she can reach. Her work lies wherever children are


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 gathered together—in the children's room of the library, in the school, the playground, the street and the home. She must also work with organized philanthropies, such as university and social settlements. This work should appeal to the earnest, broad-minded young woman who wishes to devote her efforts to the moral, esthetic, as well as the intellectual, education of children."

And what is true of the children's librarian, to a large extent is true of the reference librarian who comes in contact with the reading public. In stimulating the interest of all her visitors, in directing their reading along broader lines, in feeding the starved minds of those to whom the public opens for the first time the door to literature and literary pleasure, she is doing something more than earning her salary and serving the board which appointed her. She is uplifting humanity. In so doing she finds the fine, if narrow, path to happiness, and she is mastering the first principles of the joy of living.

With this broader view of the librarian's duties and privileges, let us consider the advantages and disadvantages of the work. This summing up of the arguments for and against the profession must not be taken as the opinion of a single worker, but as the result of much investigating, the sifting of many opinions.


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 Its advantages, except in departments where the work is largely mechanical, such as recovering books, pasting labels, running indicators, etc., are that it keeps one in touch, more or less, with the intellectual life and progress of the world; it pays regularly and fairly well; it brings one in contact with agreeable and often gifted people; and, unlike teaching, it is put aside at the day's end.

On the other hand, however, the unthinking, mechanical library worker can very easily lead a most superficial life, because her work lays undue emphasis on the intellectual side of life. Some librarians hold, however, that there really is no great goal in sight for the very able and ambitious girl; that is, she has not the same wide scope for achievement and the development of her creative faculties as the writer, the musician, the artist, the designer. She never really becomes her own mistress, as one successful librarian expressed it. Even when she is head librarian she is ruled by the board of directors. Expressing it broadly, she has less chance to give expression to her individuality than girls in many professions, like the arts, the sciences and the law.

But taking the profession as a whole, it is the ideal one for the girl who is content with routine work, a comfortable salary and the ability


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 to serve her fellow-men in a capacity which can never be termed mean, narrow or menial. She must always feel the uplift of the books among which she moves, and the call of those who need the help of her broader intelligence and equipment.

All these things the girl of sufficient education must consider, and then turn to the question of preparation.

The day of haphazard library work is past. The modern library, large or small, is systematized like the modern business establishment. The custom of giving a position to the mayor's niece when she comes back from a year at a city school, because she is the mayor's niece, and dresses well, and has nice white hands, has passed. The librarian, like the teacher, must pass an examination, and for this she must be as familiar with the high school branches and as closely in touch with the current events and literature as the candidate for a position in an up-to-date school.

Librarians throughout the country believe in a training-school. At a recent examination for applicants in connection with the public library system in New York City, only five per cent. of the girls who had been prepared at library schools failed.

There are two ways of preparing for these examinations. One is in the free training


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 schools for library workers maintained in many large cities in connection with their public library system. This generally represents giving anywhere from nine to twelve months' service to the library in return for training, after which the apprentice must pass the examination open to all applicants for the post of assistant librarian.

In New York City, for instance, the public library maintains a training-school, with sixty pupils, in connection with the Muhlenberg Branch Library in West Twenty-third Street. Two-fifths of the time the girls spend in studying various branches of library work along theoretical lines, and three-fifths they must give to actual service in the different branches, sometimes pasting labels or recovering books or doing typewriting—any service, in fact, asked of them. Each apprentice gives forty-two and one-half hours a week to library work and has precisely the same hours and routine as the paid assistant. At the end of the library year, in May, she takes her first examinations for the post of assistant librarian. If her first work is substituting, she receives from twenty to thirty dollars a month. With regular employment as a recognized assistant, her salary is raised to forty dollars. At the end of two years she takes another examination, which, if successfully passed, will raise her salary to fifty dollars a


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 is month. A year later she takes her third and last examination, which will entitle her to the post of head librarian at a salary ranging from eighty to ninety dollars, according to the library in which she is placed.

Girls who desire to enter this training-school must be between eighteen and thirty-five years of age; they must have a four-year high-school education or its equivalent, and a reading knowledge of both French and German, while greatly to their advantage will be a speaking knowledge of German.

During the time spent in studying and working in this free training-school a girl must have sufficient money for her support.

In many of the smaller cities, and in not a few large ones, no such training-schools exist, simply because the library staff, being none too large and extremely busy, time and energy cannot be spared to train uncertain material. And invariably, when you enter such a training-school, you must agree to give the library first call on your services when your apprenticeship is completed. In other words, a girl from Memphis, Tennessee, could not expect to come to New York, receive training free in connection with a New York public library, and then return to Memphis to take a position. By every moral code she should give the city in which she is trained first opportunity to use her services,


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 for strange as this may seem to out-of-town girls, it is in the large cities that the need of the trained librarian is felt most keenly, because of the rapid growth in population and in library patronage.

The girl who wishes to prepare for work in her own town, and who must go away from home to secure such training, should communicate with the endowed training-school for librarians nearest her home town. As a rule these schools are so heavily endowed that the tuition is nominal, ranging from fifty to one hundred dollars for the entire course.

For instance, at the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which has been heavily endowed by the Drexel family, the tuition for the library course of eight months is only fifty dollars, with incidentals amounting to fifteen or twenty dollars more. At Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, which has graduated a, large number of very successful librarians, the course runs two school years, of nine months each; tuition for the first year, fifty dollars; for the second, twenty-five dollars; while thirty dollars will generally cover all charges for text-books, materials, etc.

In addition to this, a student must pay her own board and living expenses, for which she should allow ten dollars a week.


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 These figures are presented merely to give the would-be librarian a general idea of what her training will cost. No school, however heavily endowed, provides board and lodging, and as a rule heads of library schools prefer that students should not attempt to work their way through the course—that is, earn board and lodging while studying. Every particle of energy and every moment of time are required for the work. The hours run from nine to four, five days in the week, with an hour for lunch, and on Saturdays there are trips to other libraries, field work, etc.

There are many library schools, including Pratt and Drexel institutes, the New York State Library School at Albany, New York, Simmons College Library School, Boston, Massachusetts, and the school attached to the University of Illinois.

As a rule a high-school education of four years or its equivalent, with a reading knowledge of German and French, is sufficient preparation for the examination held at any of these training schools, though the New York State Library School demands some college work also.

If you have graduated several years previous to taking the examination, do not trust to your memory, but brush up, "cram" if you will, as


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 you did in the old school days, for the examinations for entrance to these training-schools are by no means simple. Here, for instance, is a set of questions gleaned from a sample examination sheet, loaned by the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:

1. Mention nationality and century and characterize briefly an important work by ten of the following: Le Sage, Marlowe, Tasso, Ibsen, Maurice, Hewlett, Balzac, Sir Francis Bacon, Montaigne, Sir Thomas Malory, Lessing, Walter Pater, Paine, Swinburne, Landor, James Bryce.

2. State briefly what you know about the literary work of the following: Sainte-Beuve, Turgenieff, Dante, Gabriel, Rosetti, Heine, Thomas De Quincy.

3. Write an account (about two pages) of the poets and poetry of England at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

4, Name five important writers of ancient Greece, and specify in what department each is famous. Of ancient Rome.

5. Describe (only five lines each) the character of the following: "The Faerie Queene," "The Rubaiyat," "Idylls of the King."

6. What do you understand by the following: (a) the minnesingers; (b) the Cid; (c) the


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 morality plays; (d) Beowulf; (e) the humanists.

7. Name five of the greatest American essayists; characterize briefly the literary work of each, and mention the title of their greatest works.

8. Name two famous allegories; three famous histories of the United States; five great world epics; two famous satires; five children's classics.

9. Write a criticism (about two pages) of one of the following: Thomas Carlyle, Victor Hugo, Robert Browning.

10. To what extent has periodical literature been a part of your reading? Mention ten periodicals with which you are most familiar, and characterize briefly one weekly and one monthly periodical.

Nor does this represent the complete examination. There were other tests in English and the languages, and none too much time was allowed for answering them, either.

The examinations for entrance on the opening of the fall term, in September or October, are generally held some time in June, and this gives the applicant time to brush up if she barely passes.

Once in the school, she finds that she has many branches to study, and much to learn besides cataloguing and exchanging books. A


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 bare outline of one of the briefest courses is given herewith:

First Term—Alphabeting; book numbers, cataloguing, dictionary form; classification, decimal; current periodicals; fiction, appraisal of; French, technical; library handwriting; practice in the library; reference work; survey of the library field; typewriting (optional).

Second Term—Accession work; binding and rebinding; book selection and book buying; cataloguing, classed form—maps, government documents; children's department, work of; classification, expansive; current periodicals; fiction, appraisal of; German; technical; loan system; order work; practice in the library; reference work; shelf listing; subject headings; survey of the library field; trade bibliography; typewriting (optional).

Third Term—Bibliography; field work; history of classical learning; history of libraries; indexing; library administration; library buildings; practice in the library; proof-reading; stock-taking; supplies and statistics.

I have asked a number of librarians whether they advised specialization either in preparation for examinations or in taking the librarian course after admission to the school.

For preparation, librarians, male or female,


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 advised a broad, general education, a college education if possible, as unquestionably the college graduate or the girl with a degree is given the preference in an up-to-date library.

In regard to the work after graduation, each woman becomes a law unto herself, for she is bound to find her level or the special library work that appeals to her after she has studied and worked a short time. The woman who desires to become head librarian in a small city should not specialize, but interest herself in all branches of library work. On the other hand, the girl who leans toward charity, settlement or sociological work, should specialize on the work of the children's library. The student of languages will find her best field in the reference department.


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or twenty years ago, when a woman of family and refinement met with financial reverses, her relatives either arranged a desirable match for her, or secured for her the very genteel post of "companion" to a woman of wealth and generally uncertain temper. The duties of the "companion" were indefinite and her income was uncertain. She was in favor one day and out the next. She was socially superior to the servants in the household, yet she did not share their spirit of independence. She generally drooped until she became a pitiable, dun-colored figure, with a "what's-the-use" expression in her tired eyes.

Even to-day, girls and women of mature years, gentle breeding and good education, but with no special training for the ungentle task of earning their own living, when face to face with the problem of self-support turn, panic stricken, to this old-fashioned profession, in


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 which some shadow-like great-aunt ended her days.

"I have all sorts of social connections," such a woman will write. "I have a good English education, some knowledge of French and music, and I paint rather well on china. I think I would do very well as a companion, or social secretary, or governess, or anything of that sort. I am very patient and sympathetic."

This quotation from a real letter shows just what vague ideas inexperienced women hold regarding the posts of companion, social secretary and governess, which are hopelessly confused in the average feminine mind. The old-fashioned "companion" who had no assured position in the household, who was a dependent rather than a useful or desired factor in the family circle, has given place to a figure of energy and well-defined duties. The work of the "companion" is now that of the trained or semi-trained attendant. The social secretary to the woman of fashion is as important a figure in Madam Newly-Rich's household as her imported English butler. The private secretary to the woman of money and affairs has as clearly a defined standing in the household as the private secretary to the woman's husband in a corporation office. The invalid requires not a low-voiced, gentle-mannered girl who can read aloud and take odd stitches for her employer,


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 but a semi-trained nurse who is competent to meet any and every emergency. The family traveling abroad or living on a country estate employs a governess who could fill the post of teacher in a fashionable preparatory school and whose position combines the duties of pedagogue and chaperon.

The general, and, alas, often incompetent "companion" has no place in the present-day organization of households. Her refinement, her social connections, her "patience and sympathy," must be backed by special training for the work.

A pathetically large number of women in small inland cities and even towns imagine that they could succeed as social secretaries to newly-rich women or to social leaders who find their correspondence and charities a burden so grievous as to demand an assistant. Because these women know how to write graceful notes of invitation, acknowledgment, congratulation or condolence, how to receive guests, and how to pour tea in their own little parlors, they imagine that they could train the newly-rich woman in the social way she should go, or lift the correspondence burden from the shoulders of Miss Helen Gould or Mrs. Russell Sage.

In reality, only the woman of extraordinary executive ability and experience can fill either position. Social secretaries are born, not


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 trained. Those generally chosen for the post are women of family and social position, who have met with financial reverses, and whose chief asset is not their ability to indite a graceful note, but to place at the command of their employer their own social acquaintance, which is invaluable to the newcomer. The employer already established socially has for her secretary a young woman who is one of her household staff, or who calls daily to answer correspondence, send out invitations or perform other clerical duties. But if the employer is newly arrived on the social horizon, she selects as her secretary one of the women reared in luxury and social favor, who has been suddenly deprived of financial revenue.

This sort of secretary must have the names of desirable people at her finger-tips. She must be able to tell her employer who is worth meeting and who should be avoided, and she must bring her own social connections to bear in furthering the interests of her ambitious client. She must know how to arrange entertainments for her employer, and how to bring the right people to Mrs. Newly-Rich's house. She is social sponsor rather than secretary, a human' compendium of smart etiquette and good form, an advisory board in the question of gowns and house furnishings. In fact, she is to the social climber what the campaign manager is to the


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 presidential candidate. She keeps her from doing the wrong things.

Can you picture the diplomacy, the social training, the experience necessary to perform these complicated duties? In your heart, do you believe you could perform them? If so, fill your trunk with pretty clothes, your bag with letters of introduction to influential men and women, and be prepared to work like a diplomat for a foothold in the fashionable world. You must gain this before you can apply for a post as social secretary. You will have more things to do than arrange invitation lists. If you do not believe this, read Edith Wharton's wonderful story of fashionable life, "The House of Mirth."

A young woman who thought that she would like to be private secretary to a club-woman, urged as one of her qualifications the fact that she could write excellent literary papers. She was greatly surprised when she learned that she must have a knowledge of stenography before she could apply for such a position, so heavy is the correspondence of a club-woman of state or national fame.

But she was not dismayed, for she was a girl with "the one idea"—to become a private secretary. She is in New York to-day, almost at the end of her course in shorthand and typewriting. In the meantime she has joined sev-


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 eral active clubs, and has lived at an apartment house in whose parlors many women's organizations meet. Moreover, she has learned how to dress in a fashion suitable to the secretary of a woman of affairs. She has laid aside the somewhat gay, if girlish, finery she brought to New York, and has achieved the tailor-made air and the good grooming which stamp her as a successful business girl, even before she has a position. After preparing for the work in so thorough and systematic a way, I believe that her first position will be one that many a more experienced girl might envy.

Incidentally, clothes and bearing count tremendously if you desire to be on the staff of well-to-do employers. The day of the shrinking, shabby, self-effacing companion is past. The capable woman has arrived—even in the rôle of companion.

The girl who desires a position as compan ion or attendant to a semi-invalid must prepare for this work also. At any registry for trained nurses they will tell you that the custom of employing training-school graduates as traveling companions is growing. This does not mean that you must take a full course to secure any such position, but you should have had some experience in nursing, and if you have not had this you can take an abridged course in nursing, such as the Young Women's Christian Associa-


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 tion offers in large cities, and which will fit you for any emergencies which may arise during the journey with a delicate employer. Your certificate from such a school, letters of introduction to physicians, good health, cheerfulness, steady nerves and a talent for minimizing discomforts of travel will insure your success in this work.

On board a steamship bound for the Mediter ranean, my table companion was a wealthy New York woman who was really quite well and strong, but who believed that she was traveling for her health. The chair on her right had been vacant during the entire voyage, and just before landing she explained the situation:

"My traveling companion has just gone on deck for the first time since we passed Sandy Hook. I engaged her to wait upon me, and she has not raised her head from her pillow until to-day. When I think of what I shall have to tip our stewardess! But, you see, she never crossed before, and did not understand that the longer she remained in her berth the sicker she would become. In Naples I shall give her a month's salary and a ticket home. I cannot be bothered with her any longer. I shall be turning nurse myself next. And it serves me right for giving the position to a girl who needed money, rather than to an experienced companion, I might have known that a girl with


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 those beseeching eyes and a dimple in her chin would be no earthly use to me."

If you want to be a traveling companion you must first learn how to travel, how to handle tickets and baggage, how to lift all responsibilities from your fussy, fretful patron, how to keep yourself and your charge fresh-looking and well groomed on boat or train, how to handle the inevitable laundry problem, how to protect your employer from the extortions of hackmen and porters. In fact, you are troublebearer-in-extraordinary.

The girl who has traveled and thoroughly enjoys it, who has some knowledge of nursing or attendance upon the sick, should try to reach patrons through physicians. If her acquaintance will not warrant this, there are agencies where she may register, and many openings come through the "want ad," columns of city papers.

A beautiful if somewhat trying work is done by a number of young women, trained as described above, in families of the rich, where an unfortunate daughter must be screened from curious eyes. If you are not afraid of epileptic patients or of one suffering from some mild mental derangement, you can find work of this sort which pays well and insures a life of comparative ease. Very often these unhappy daughters of the very rich are kept, with their


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 attendants, on country estates. Sometimes, if the mental defect is very slight, they are permitted to travel. With many the attacks are periodic, and during the interim these poor girls are pleasant company.

For the companion who does her duty by such a patient, the reward is generous, and the family shows its appreciation in a most practical manner, while the devotion and appreciation of the patient is in itself a beautiful recompense.

And now for the many teachers who desire positions in families going abroad for a protracted tour. The woman who has only a high-school education has little or no chance to seeure such a post. If the trip is for a year or more, the education of the children goes on precisely as if they were at home with a visiting or resident governess. That is, during certain hours of each day regular lessons are given, and the studies are those offered in fashionable private schools. A knowledge of French and German is almost essential. If there are boys in the party, Latin and Greek must be taught. Drawing and music may be included in the course of instruction, and, more than this, the traveling governess assumes almost entire responsibility for the children during the trip, unless a maid is also carried. She is chaperon to the girls on board ship, and their companion during all sight-seeing trips, for which reason


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 she must be well posted on history, art and literature. College girls who have traveled abroad, or governesses who have already had experience in this country, are generally given the preference.

The scale of salaries is a sliding one, governed largely by the personality of the applicant and the liberality and good humor of the employer.

Twenty-five to thirty-five dollars a month with all expenses paid, is considered liberal remuneration for a governess traveling abroad with two or three young charges. Trained nurses receive the regulation wages, twenty to twenty-five dollars a week if traveling with a patient who is really ill and requires much attention. For chronic or light cases, where the duties are almost nominal, some nurses will accept as low as ten dollars per week if a pleasant trip is in prospect. These are graduate nurses, you understand. A trained attendant and companion, such as I described further back in this chapter, may receive anything from ten dollars per month to ten dollars per week, with all expenses, and this payment is measured by the fancy which the captious invalid takes to her few-found protége.

Here is a case in point: A whimsical old lady spent several months at a New York hotel, and there took a fancy to a hard-working stenogra-


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 pher employed in the office. She invited the girl to go to Europe with her, and off they started in the most unbusinesslike fashion. There was no understanding about wages, but the girl was to have everything she needed for the trip at the hands of her newly-acquired godmother. It was all very lovely until they struck rough weather half way across the Atlantic, and the girl succumbed to mal de mer. The old lady regarded this unfortunate circumstance as a personal affront, and directly they reached London she informed the young woman that she might have a return ticket and take herself off. And that is precisely what the poor girl did. Terrified to find herself in the metropolis of the world, without friends or influence, she came home on the very next steamer, with just enough money of her own left to pay for her steamer chair and to tip her stewards. She was glad to get back to a typewriter and a small but regular salary.

Social secretaries receive large salaries, but spend a great deal on dress. On the other hand, they receive many beautiful and valuable gifts from clients. Private secretaries to women of affairs receive about the same salary as office girls, but have more pleasant surroundings and often less strenuous work.

Thoughtful and ambitious girls reading this chapter may think that the position of governess or companion or secretary does not open


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 up a career or promise any brilliant future. That depends entirely upon the girl herself. The position of governess in a family of wealth and influence, or as a companion to a rich invalid, or as secretary to a woman of affairs, will bring you in contact with men and women who can offer you better positions. If you have the true business instinct, it will develop, even if you are merely a companion or governess. You will meet successful people, and in that atmosphere you will learn how to carve success for yourself with tools vastly different from those which you picked up when you first took the position. At best the post of companion is merely a makeshift, and as one agent remarked, it is more apt to lead to the matrimonial market than to any commercial career.

Akin to the post of chaperon for young girls traveling abroad is that of chaperon in a private school. A few of the fashionable finishing schools located near large cities offer openings of this sort, and women of social standing, charming manners and good judgment are eligible applicants. The salary is just large enough to pay one's bills for gowns and hats, but board and lodging and laundry are included, while all incidental expenses, carfares, tickets, etc., are paid by the pupils chaperoned. The work of the chaperon includes escorting young girls to theaters, concerts, lectures and shopping trips


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 to town, also to any private function, such as receptions, dances or musicales to which parties of pupils may be invited. In some schools these tasks are relegated to teachers and no chaperon is employed, but the custom is growing. Such positions appeal particularly to the widow left with a small income and perhaps a daughter whom she desires to educate in such a school.

One widow, with her daughter, is located in a mid-West church school, and in addition to her work as chaperon she makes exquisite lingerie of batiste and handkerchief linen, which she sells to wealthy pupils.

In large cities like New York, Chicago and Washington, women have taken to the work of guiding sight-seers, and a well-balanced, pleasant-mannered and well-posted young woman can do very well at such work. Of course, she acts as escort for parties of women only or parties made up of both sexes, never parties of men. She must arrange sight-seeing tours which occupy various periods of time, register at hotels and agencies, and be able not only to point out points of historical interest, but she must know about all desirable shops, from art to manicuring. A young woman who can plan attractive trips for sight-seers will soon find favor with hotel clerks, who are glad to recommend any one capable of making the city and ifs sights attractive to visitors.


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girl thrown suddenly upon her own resources and forced to earn her living, not in a few months or weeks, but to-morrow, millinery offers no practical inducements. Neither is it the trade to be chosen by the girl who intends to remain in business just long enough to earn a trousseau or to support herself until her fiancé is financially able to marry.

It does not yield quick returns. Its apprenticeship is so ill-paid that it does not insure even the shelter of a working-girl's home. And there is no royal road to millinery success.

On the other hand, perhaps no trade, distinctly feminine, promises more certain, more lasting rewards to the ambitious girl with the true business instinct. Once thoroughly mastered, it places her in a position of absolute independence. She does not have to seek work. Positions and employers seek her. It is, therefore, worthy the consideration of the deft-fingered girl whose ambitions are commercial rather than matrimonial.


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 Openings are to be found in both the retail and the wholesale establishments. In the large cities, each branch of the trade has two distinct seasons. The spring retail season in the workrooms runs from February 1st to May 30th. The fall season in the retail shop runs from August 15th to November ist. In the wholesale establishments the spring trade lasts from January 1st to March 15th, the fall trade from July 1st to September 30th.

The girl who would succeed in millinery must have deft fingers, a genius for combining colors, ambition, energy and a tremendous capacity for hard work. Before her rise five uncomprising steps which lead to the capstone of efficiency and the coveted position of buyer.

Having decided that she has the natural ability and the persistency to learn the trade, she will apply to the owner or forewoman of a millinery establishment just before the season opens, which means in the retail field about the first of February or the middle of August. If she has traded regularly at a certain store, and if her family has a personal friend employed in a millinery workroom, an introduction through such a medium is invaluable. If she is accepted as a learner or apprentice, she will spend the first season making bandeaux, the bands tacked under the crowns and brims of hats to give them the correct tilt or raised effect. Day in and day


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 Bras out, she will sew wire and canvas together. For this she will receive $1.50 per week, unless it is a small shop and she is willing to sweep and dust out, in which case she will be paid $3 per week. If she is particularly apt, at the end of the season she may be promised promotion to the post of improver. If she has not made a good record, she must return for a second season as an apprentice, and make more bandeaux for another three months.

As an improver, she makes frames and shirs maline, chiffon, lace, velvet and other fabrics for hat foundations at a salary varying from $5 to $8 per week. These two steps usually absorb at least a year and a half of her training.

The third step is the post of preparer or milliner. Outsiders call any woman engaged in the business a milliner. To the trade, the preparer or milliner is the worker who makes the hat, covers it, sorts out the trimmings suggested, and prepares everything as ordered by the woman above her—the trimmer. Her salary during this period varies from $8 to $15. With her next step upward, her dependance upon other women ceases. From this time on she rises or falls through her own ability or inefficiency.

The fourth step is the position of copyist. Here her work consists of reproducing imported models, and if she is accurate in her imita-


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 tions and is able to give the copy the "air" of the model hat, she will command from $15 to $25 per week, according to the size of the shop and city in which she works.

Step number five makes her the autocrat of the shop—the trimmer. Now she originates her own designs and commands as high as $75 a week. The woman who reaches this point is in line for the position of buyer, which, with many establishments, represents semi-annual trips to Paris. The girl who combines with her practical knowledge of the trade a natural commercial instinct, or the knowledge of what to buy and how much, can name her own salary.

This sort of woman seldom has difficulty in securing financial backing, if she desires to open a shop of her own. In fact, there is no limit to the commercial possibilities which her trade opens up. But it must be borne in mind that fully five years of patient, conscientious work, together with intelligent observation and strict attention to the commercial end of the trade or merchandising are required to place a woman in this independent and assured position.

"Is there no way by which I can escape this irksome apprenticeship? Are there no schools where millinery is taught?"

These question come from every point of the compass, for the average American girl has begun to believe that anything and everything can


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 be learned in one trade school or another, and thus save her the period of humble service through which her aunts and great-aunts passed.

In reply I can only say that the apprenticeship cannot be escaped. Millinery cannot be learned from books. Its theory can be presented by means of charts and blackboard drawings, but the finger—your fingers—must be come familiar with, and deft at, the various forms of stitchery. Familiarity and deftness come with practice, not with the study of theory. If the reader thinks she would like to become a milliner, provided she did not have to serve three or six months making bandeaux, then let her enter a trade high school, or elect the domestic arts course in her last years at school, and get what theoretical and practical training the public schools offer. Then when she enters the millinery shop—and enter it by the learners' door she certainly must—shetmay know how to make bandeaux, and, if she proves this to the milliner and trimmer, she will soon be intrusted with a better grade of work.

But if the reader has any idea that she can take a "get-the-salary-quick" course at a private school which offers to teach millinery in three to six months at a tuition fee varying from $15 to $50, and immediately secure a position as trimmer in a good shop, she is


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 making a grave mistake. In any schoolroom, where an hour a day or perhaps a few hours each day are given to work on material provided by the pupil, to be made into a hat for her own wear, the training cannot be so thorough as where the worker spends eight hours a day with her needle, working on materials for which an employer pays and which she must neither waste nor spoil. Moreover, the teacher in a private class does not like to offend the student who is paying for tuition, and who may recommend the school to other pupils, so she kindly but injudiciously overlooks careless stitchery, slovenly work, and inefficient methods, and thus the student-worker acquires habits which no forewoman in a good shop would tolerate.

One of the most famous endowed schools for the technical training of women makes this announcement in its year book: "Millinery Course. Five days a week—three months. Applicants should be sixteen years of age, at least, and must be able to do simple sewing. The student provides her own materials for classroom work, and is recommended to have on hand old materials which may be renovated and used in making and trimming hats. A course in simple business methods is given on one afternoon each week. Two afternoons are devoted to drawing hats, that ability may be gained in


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 sketching hats at exhibitions or openings. Students who are good workers and desire positions after completing this course are recommended to wholesale and retail houses in the city.

"Course of Study—Designing, drafting and making of buckram and wire frames. Study of form, color and textiles. Making plain covered hats with different finishing for brims. Making bows. Covering wire frames with straw braids and other materials. Making children's hats. Designing, making and trimming of all styles of hats, according to the season. Practice in pencil sketching of bows and simple hats. Time and memory sketches. The study of textiles as related to different types.

"Tuition fee—$25 for three months."

This little announcement, more clearly than any argument I might prepare, demonstrates the impossibility of cramming a millinery apprenticeship into three months of school work. And in justice to these recognized trade schools, it must be said that they do not deceive pupils by promising high-salaried positions, nor do they pretend to save a pupil the irksome months as an apprentice. When a girl talks with the head of such a training-school, she soon learns that an abbreviated course of this sort, in connection with other branches of the domestic or household arts, aims to develop the all-round,


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 capable home woman, the woman who can administer her household economically, make her own simple clothes, and trim her own hats. The trade schools which promise to turn out competent trade workers or self-supporting graduates offer a two or three-year course, and the girl who elects this course serves as gradual and thorough an apprenticeship as she would in a shop.

Retailers and wholesalers who employ many girls tell me that occasionally a girl who has taken a short course in millinery makes a phenomenal record in the workroom, but she would do the same thing had she entered the room as an apprentice without training, because she is a born milliner and business woman combined. Again, girls who have been trained in a trade school must practically acquire the trade anew, or drop it entirely when they enter a workshop, because they did slovenly work in school and will not do conscientious, thorough work in the shop.

This chapter should not be misconstrued as an attack on the trade school. The girl who elects the technical high-school course and then enters a millinery workroom certainly has the advantage over the girl who never went to a trade school and whose fingers are awkward and unused to handwork of any sort. But I certainly do wish to warn girls against the type


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 of private trade schools which assures the student that she will be saved all apprenticeship and be able to take a place as trimmer on leaving the school. These irresponsible managers of rapid-instruction schools are to blame for the tremendous influx of half-trained girls into the trade fields. Their "graduates" must compete with girls who have worked their way up by hard experience. Unwilling to start afresh and acquire a practical knowledge of the trade, they hang on the fringe of the millinery world, working for a mere pittance and never rising to that position of independence which a real knowledge of the trade insures.

"But I know a woman who is head of the millinery department of a store and she cannot trim a hat!" exclaims one reader.

Quite possibly this is true, for I know just such a woman. She cannot trim a hat—but she knows how it ought to be trimmed, and she knows a great many other important points in the business or she would not be head of the department. And she served a hard apprenticeship.

The successful woman to whom I refer started fifteen years ago as errand girl in the millinery department of a then young store. When the saleswomen in the department wanted some one to hold hats for them while serving a customer, or a girl to run upstairs and get a hat


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 which the trimmer was just finishing, this little twelve-year-old worker did their bidding. When hats were to be delivered by special messenger, she carried them home. Thus she heard the comments of customers. She learned why some girls are better saleswomen than others. She found out that by changing the tilt of a hat, the direction of a feather, the arrangement of a bow or a flower, an unbecoming hat became becoming—and salable.

In the workroom she studied how waste was prevented by competent trimmers and forewomen. She learned the values of trimmings and of workers. She saw how the firm guarded against loss through carrying too heavy a stock.

When other errand girls went into the shop to sew, she preferred to remain in the showrooms and run errands between the shop and the showroom. When she was sixteen and donned long skirts, she commenced to sell hats. She studied the faces of her customers and never let one of them leave the store unless the hat suited the face. She drew trade such as the store had never been able to control.

In time the buyer of the department consulted her about styles preferred by her trade. The head saleswoman left the store to marry, and the one-time errand girl succeeded her. Armed with this authority, she entered the workroom and dictated the department's policy.


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 She knew what her trade wanted and insisted that the milliners under her should please her trade. The firm, watching the growing profits in the department, backed her with its authority.

The buyer of the department, who also bought for the ribbon department, died suddenly of heart-disease. The one-time errand girl was appointed as his successor and at his salary.

She served an apprenticeship to become a buyer. She would have become the buyer in any department where she started, simply because it was in her to succeed. She made a study of the department, its trade, and its trend. She did not pretend to trim a hat, but she could tell a customer how an undesirable hat could be made becoming, and then from the customer she went to the milliner and had the change made. Some day she will own a shop, and no forewoman, milliner or trimmer will be able to waste her stock or distatedistaste [sic] the policy of her establishment.

And that brings us to the common mistake of the woman with a little capital.

"My husband died recently, leaving me three thousand dollars in life insurance. I want to invest at least half of it in some sort of business. We have no good millinery store in this town. How shall I start one?"

Any number of pitiful little tragedies of


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 finance are suggested by these letters. For even when a woman is advised against the step she follows her own inclination and opens the shop, only to lose all through her ignorance of the trade. She does not know how to buy. She does not know how to direct the work of those whose knowledge of hat-making and trimming is necessary to draw custom. She is deceived by unscrupulous jobbers and wholesalers.

The woman with a little money to invest should not consider opening a millinery store unless she can spend at least two seasons actually working in a wholesale trimming establishment in a millinery center like New York, Chicago, or St. Joe. She should take any sort of work offered, and keep her eyes everlastingly open to what is going on around her in the workroom. At the end of her second season she may not know how to trim hats, but she will know many tricks of the trade, and how to select a trimmer for her venture, also something about buying goods. This work in a trade center may not even pay her board, unless she lives at a home for working-girls; but on the other hand it may open her eyes to the pitfalls of the business, and save for herself and her family the money she was so keen to invest.

If she cannot serve the commercial apprenticeship, then she should find a practical partner, rather than hire all of her workers. Per-


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 haps there is a really competent milliner in her own town or vicinity, struggling with the problem of small capital or a shop which she cannot afford to make attractive or which is located far from the center of the town. If the practical trimmer and the widow with money to invest can join forces, the widow's investment will be much safer, for her partner's aim will be to buy as frugally as possible and thus insure the biggest possible profits. On the other hand, the milliner working on salary for the inexperienced investor of small capital will think only of making a big showing to the trade. She will order stock far beyond the needs of the town, and unless she is an unusual character she will not prevent the small leaks in the workroom which cut down profits and often lead to failure.


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