Fatigue is necessary, cannot be avoided; but should never be carried to the verge of exhaustion.

A moderately strong woman should commence with a mile as minimum, to be gradually increased to four, and the latter distance should be taken in two hours.

Returning, a rest is necessary, but all clothing should be changed first if any perspiration has occurred.

After an hour, a hearty breakfast may be eaten and our lady is ready for the day's labor, responsibility or society duties, as the case may be.

Horseback riding is advantageous to young women only. After maternity has crowned them it is too violent to be safe, and indeed is rarely attractive. It can never be of equal value hygienically with walking, but may supplement it where circumstances seem to make it desirable.

But for youthful maidens who have learned to ride, there is, in a gallop over a countryroad a wild exhilaration that has few equals when cavaliers are of the chosen band-and it has the immense advantage over walking, that it is expensive. People are always more ready to adhere to costly advice than cheap, especially when they can ill afford it. Riding is as useful in afternoon as in the early day; should not, as a rule, be longer than the two hours allotted for the longest walk, and never should be indulged in with a full stomach. Violent attacks of dyspepsia have followed neglect of the last suggestion.

After watching results from cycling in several cases, I am satisfied that it is not fitted for women. The peculiar motion produces rhythmic contractions of abdominal and pelvic muscles that act unfavorably upon organs to which they are attached, resembling the effect of steady work upon a sewing machine. Much more might be said in this direction were it necessary; but American roads act as so potent a hindrance to widespread tandem riding that it is scarcely likely to demand much medical attention. Nor does the nervous temperament of our women favor its increase. It is too slow, demands too much labor, and lacks the stimulus of accessibility, besides needing a companion. It will not become general.

Lawn tennis is without doubt the best allround exercise for women in vogue. It combines training of eye and muscle with steady, even, gentle and effective development of lungs and heart capacity, and demands open air. If our girls would only follow examples that have been set them in other countries, and leave off corsets altogether when preparing for the game, there would be but one thing lacking to make it the ideal of female exercise-that is, the equal use of both hands. Tennis has been objected to because it develops one side of the body and not the other; a fault hard to overcome, it is true, but not insurmountable. If the racket is held in each hand in turn for half an hour daily while practice serving is made, less than a month will be required to use both hands at will, an immense advantage in the game, and the body will develop symmetrically.

This objection obtains with far greater force in fencing, a play that is somewhat popular for women in certain cities. Here the right side is almost exclusively used, and only a cursory study of the figure of a swordsman will convince a medical man of the unwisdom of "la fleurette" for women. It has the additional disadvantage of being competitive to a degree that usually arouses temper, and of being carried on in close rooms. Like cycling, it is too unlikely to spread widely to need much attention here.

Rowing is undeniably good. Every muscle of the body is regularly and synchronously exercised, and development proceeds with symmetrical regularity, while over-fatigue is avoided by the many rests called for by lovely scenery or other interruptions.

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Nothing can be pleasanter, more fun," than a boating trip upon some pretty river, where the company is equally divided as to sex and the weather is auspicious.

In whatever form our women exercise, however, it should be said that perseverance is a main factor.

To walk a mile to-day and rest to-morrow because muscles are tired and ache a little, is unscientific. Better begin small, and steadily increase. It is absolute regularity that tells in this as in every other form of cure.

William F. Hutchinson, M. D.

Country Home vs. Country Boarding. SHALL we board, or shall we rent a small cottage? This is a question often asked just now by those contemplating spending the summer in the country. Some ladies look forward to the country as a playground, and think the cares of housekeeping are to be left with the cobble-stones. These are content to endure the discomforts of boarding for its attendant leisure. Under no circumstances can a family with children be absolutely comfortable at a boarding-house. No reflection, however, is intended on wellmanaged country boarding-houses; many of them are admirably kept, and are to an extent something like home. To an extent only; for there is a freedom, an enjoyment about a country home that the boarder can never experience. Then there are a great many people who advertise for summer boarders without the most remote idea of making their guests comfortable. In fact, they have not the means nor the advantages to do so, had they the best ideas in the world. They buy their groceries at a second-rate country store; have no chickens on the place, and therefore no eggs; and there is possibly an ill-kept garden which produces nothing. In this case the boarder eats vegetables and chickens from the market-house in the city; and drinks milk brought to him by the same milkman who furnished it to him there. He really profits naught by his exchange of comfort for discomfort, save in breathing pure air; and there is a very fair chance of that not being as pure as he breathed in the city.

The privations and discomforts endured by seekers after health and happiness in country boarding-houses are great. The house is often lonesome, the surroundings dirty, the host and hostess uncongenial; there are no books and few newspapers; from the porch you gaze on the one side at the barnyard, and on the other at a monotonous stubblefield; your children get mixed up with horned cattle; your room is in a garret-and where is there a hotter place than a country garret after the sun has glared a long summer's day on the shingles? If you will board, you can always find somebody of reduced circumstances with a boarding house. Here you will be obliged to pay a large amount, but you will live, you will find pleasant people around you, and the table will remind you of your own.

If you wish to live retired, seek out a large farm where chickens and cows are

kept; where the hostess is clean and pleasant, and where the host has an idea about the laws of health in the arrangement of barn and cesspool. Do not be inveigled by advertisements; if you cannot find comfort in the country, keep the comfort you had in the town, and be thankful.

But why board at all? On the course of every railroad leading through our large cities, whole rows of suburban cottages are springing up. Cozy little cottages they are, with from one and a half to two acres of land attached, and renting for say three hundred dollars per annum.

Why not take one of these?

"Too expensive; can't possibly afford it; don't want a house for a year; don't want to pay a gardener twenty dollars a month, nor pay fifty dollars for a cow. No; out of the question!"

Be

Notwithstanding your positive position, the question may be argued. The rent can be reduced, and you need not keep the house for a year. You take it for twelve months from the first of May, and you propose leaving the first of October. There will be seven months during which the house will be unoccupied. Now, about the middle of August offer to rent your house to some clever laboring man for seven dollars a month. tween that time and the first of October you will find several who will be glad to get such comfortable winter quarters for so little money. Rent your house to the clever laborer. He won't hurt it. Two days, a woman and a scrubbing brush will make it as clean as a new pin if you resolve to return next May; and you have reduced your rent to $250.

Now as to the gardener: you don't want him, for you don't want a garden.

"A country-place without a garden is something like the play of 'Hamlet' minus Hamlet," you say.

It is, somewhat; a garden is a very pleasant thing, but, like many other things, it is expensive unless you do all the gardening yourself, which would be as likely to result in sunstroke as in any very remarkable vegetable productions. In your neighborhood there are a number of people who have gardens; and these people will be glad to sell you what vegetables you need, as cheap as you could possibly raise them, and with much less expenditure of worry and vexation. Besides, if you have only two acres you have no room for a garden; you need the grass as pasture for your cow.

"Keep a cow, and dispense with a garden?"

A capable, skillful teacher has, by virtue of these qualities, more than an ordinary mind. And this is equally true, from first to last, of those who teach the youngest members of the primary classes, as well as of those who put the finishing touches to the education of a graduate from the university curriculum. None but the best minds should be employed to do any part of the work of teaching. And their services should be more highly appreciated than those of any other class in the community.

But public instruction in the towns and cities of the country is becoming more and more an organized labor. It is not merely the work of a single instructor with an individual mind, guiding it through all the steps of its progressive course, but of many teachers suiting their efforts to many minds at the different stages of their intellectual advancement.

A well organized and classified school, complete in all its appointments, and manned with thoroughly qualified teachers is one of the finest products of a democratic civilization. A group of such schools under one management, or supervision, constitutes a city system of schools, and the work of directing and controlling such a system is the most difficult duty in the business of education. The function of supervision is comparatively new in the history of education, and its importance has developed very rapidly in the past few years.

New York.

C.

Is Mr. Ingersoll an Atheist ?

I HAVE often heard it stated that Mr. Robert G. Ingersoll, the orator, is not so much an atheist as he is a professional atheist, and the concluding paragraph of his recent eulogy of the departed Roscoe Conkling would seem decidedly to bear out this statement. The paragraph referred to is appended, the Italics, of course, being mine:

And as he (Mr. Conkling) lived, he died. Proudly he entered the darkness or the dawn-that we call death. Unshrinkingly he passed beyond our horizon, beyond the twilight's purple hills, beyond the utmost reach of human harm or help-to that vast realm of silence or of joy where the innumerable dwell; and he has left with us his wealth of thought and deed-the memory of a brave, imperious, honest man, who bowed alone to death.

Evidently, Mr. Ingersoll believes in something beyond the grave. New York.

E. D. A.

About Sensational Preaching.

I THINK that the department in the AMERICAN MAGAZINE called the "American Pulpit" is an exceedingly valuable feature. What is wanted now-a-days is a religion that will enter into our daily life and business, and yet not so obtrude itself as to become obnoxious. Still there seems to be rather a tendency to give preference to sensational religious matter in your columns; and, in regard to this, I desire to enter a protest.

It does to me appear a very open question whether the beneficial results of the efforts of sensational preachers are at all comparable with those of the pious, industrious, steadygoing ministers of the Gospel. I will grant

that a sensational minister does "draw a

crowd." I will further admit that many of the crowd he draws would not otherwise go to church. These are, however, I think, the only advantages that are usually claimed for sensational preaching. One of the many points against sensationalism in the pulpit is that it has a tendency to undermine your confidence in the minister's sincerity. When you perceive him going out of his way to make a point seemingly on the spur of the moment, for his congregation either to laugh at or applaud-and if the applause does not come readily, he will stand still and wait for it; and when you are informed that the same spontaneous (?) point has been studied out a week before and sent to newspapers to be published as a telegram on the Monday morning-such a man, to my mind, seems to be seeking an immediate result from his work, rather than in pursuing a doctrine of love of God and love of fellow-men, and waiting for his reward in another and better world. I have been to a church of a sensational minister when the sermon has been a secondary matter; when the advertisement of a summer excursion has almost taken more time than the sermon, and yet the congregation appeared to be perfectly satisfied.

Now, when I go to church I believe in going for the good of my soul; and when I see in my favorite magazine a department so valuable and so capable of producing good results, I do not, as I said before, believe in seeing its beneficial effects nullified without entering my protest. Brooklyn, N. Y.

J. J. S.