ideal life of the artist than does she whom the world knows best as Clara Morris.

Agnes Booth (whom in private life we know as Mrs. John B. Schoffel), has been called the American Bernhardt, and in all the essentials of the most finished and exquisite details of art; in an indescribable charm of presence, a magnetic sway over the audiences, the two great artists have much in common. The differences of race are lost sight of in affinities of temperament. So incomparably great an artist is Agnes Booth that it is no more a compliment to her to be thought of as akin to Mme. Bernhardt than it is to Mme. Bernhardt to be thought of as akin to Mrs. Booth. In Agnes Booth, however, one feels too, in all her great effects as an artist, the noble, lofty, generous, tender and delicately-organized womanhood behind the artist. Mrs. Schoffel is as radiantly enchanting off the stage as she is on it. Born in Australia, coming when very young to America; having been on the stage almost from childhood, and with her art life, living, too, the life of wife and mother and friend, she has wrought out of all these varied elements a womanhood of such richness and sweetness and power, as must lend to the actress much of that indefinable charm that we feel in her stage impersonations. Manager and Mrs. Schoffel make their winter home in New York; their summer cottage is at Manchester-by-the-Sea, one of the most picturesque of New England seaside resorts, and between her art and her home, Mrs. Booth lives a full and beautiful life. The subtlety, the brilliant intensity of her dramatic creations are unsurpassed by those of any living actress, and it will be left for the critic of the future to do full justice to the genius of Agnes Booth.

CHAPTER XLII.

WOMEN IN BUSINESS AND TRADE.

EDITORIAL.

WOMA

WOMAN'S work in several lines is so concisely stated in an article which appeared in the Minneapolis Tribune, that we

quote from it here:

"In the multiplicity of employments now open to women, and the liberal wages earned in many of them, students of sociology note an almost incredible advance from the old Colonial days, and even from the conditions that prevailed in the first half of the present century. In Colonial times there were no women wage-earners save in domestic service, and in the rougher work of tilling the soil. In the former, thirty dollars a year was considered a liberal salary; in the latter, the woman was glad to earn six or seven shillings a week. The farmers' wives and daughters cultivated the flax from which they made the household linen, and carded, dyed, spun and wove the woollen garments of husbands, sons and brothers, which were made up by the paripatetic country tailoress, who worked for twenty-five cents a day. Every woman was also her own dressmaker and milliner. The Harvard graduating class of 1770 were all dressed in homemade broadcloth.

"The Colonial working-day was fixed by law at from 5 a. m. to 8 p. m., from March to September, with half an hour for breakfast, and one and a half hours' 'nooning.' Buttons and gloves were made at home. Knitting and spinning were constant industries. The hired spinner, for doing her allotted stint in the best manner, received sixpence a day and board. Save the keepers of 'dame's schools' in the towns, there were no women teachers. The higher schools of learning, as well as the trades, professions, and business life, were all

Mrs. Mathilda B. Carse.

closed to the weaker sex, who yet managed to get through an amount of drudgery in farm and household work which might well have appalled the stoutest man's heart. The opening of factories 100 years ago made a radical change in industrial conditions for women. To these flocked farmers' daughters of the better class, only too glad to escape from the poverty and grinding toil of their homes. But they gained little by the exchange. A day's labor in the mills began at 5 a. m. and lasted from twelve to fifteen hours. The early New England factory operatives were taxed to support religion, fined for absence from church, and led lives as strictly regulated as those of the cloister, and all this for a wage of from thirty to fifty cents a day, and under the worst sanitary conditions.

"Immigration gradually drove out American labor from the mills. In New England the factory employés are now mostly French Canadians. Legislation has enforced sanitary laws, shortened hours of labor, raised wages, banished children below a certain age from the mills, and in all respects improved the condition of operatives.

"So many congenial and remunerative employments are now open to women that few of the more intelligent choose the life of the factory, which was once almost the only outside avenue open to them, and which, under later and better auspices, drew to it the best classes of young women from the rural districts—a class that forty years ago sent out as its representatives Lucy Larcom, Mrs. H. H. Robinson and other cultured young women, whose life finds record in that monthly magazine called the Lowell Offering, which they themselves conducted, and which receives such charming mention in Miss Larcom's recent volume of 'Recollections.' While on all lines of progress our latter-day world has made rapid advances, in none are they so marked as in the woman's world. The evolution of the woman lawyer, physician, bookkeeper, stenographer, journalist, artist, teacher, writer, etc., from the ill paid farm, household and factory drudge of the earlier part of the century, is one of the most signal triumphs of modern civilization."

It is estimated that over 6,000 women in the United States, act as postmistresses. The largest number for any one state, 463, is in Pennsylvania. Arlo Bates tells of a woman who, though she needed work and had no immediate prospect of it, refused to take an