Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/295

Rh their labors for the young still go on, and instruction becomes, more and more, education. The large school of Professor Naville, in Geneva, is based upon the method of Père Girard; and who can calculate the homes in which Madame de Saussure's book has not awakened new life, and nobler views of life, and of the vocation of woman?

Many courses of lectures have been given this spring, in Geneva. Amongst these, I have been most interested by those delivered by the amiable and Christian archæologist, Troyon, on the remains of the dwellings and mode of life on the lakes, of the most eminent inhabitants of Switzerland. For the rest, it seems to me difficult to live in Geneva, without every day learning something new. The city is full of intellectual life, of many kinds,—ecclesiastical, political, and scientific, of interests and questions, of lectures, exhibitions, and sermons,—from which one can almost always learn something; and if it be true that Geneva is, as I have been told, the paradise of unmarried women, le paradis des vieilles filles, it is so, in fact, because they can there so easily satisfy that hungering after the food of intelligence, which is being awakened more and more in the women of the present time, and which the unmarried have more time to satisfy than they who have husband, and children, and housekeeping duties, to occupy them. Besides which, women, in this Canton, attain to a legal majority at the age of twenty, and by this means, whether in or out of the paternal house, to a certain degree of independence. This is also the case in other of the Swiss Cantons, and, indeed, as I believe, in all of them.