THINGS AS THEY ARE.
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So fixed and wide-spread a custom must have had, at some time or other, even if it has not now, a meaning and a justification. And this may perhaps be found in the fact that our mothers and our grandmothers were accustomed to undergo at home, after leaving school, what was in fact an apprenticeship to household management. It seems indeed at one time to have been customary to apprentice girls of what we now call the middle class, to trades,—as we find George Herbert urging his Country Parson not to put his children 'into vain trades and unbefitting the reverence of their father's calling, such as are taverns for men and lacemaking for women,'—but even where there was no apprenticeship to a specific business, the round of house-
