After this, life went on with tolerable regularity. There was plenty of amusement. Old New York did not suffer. Laura Keene thrilled them with the "Hunchback," and many another personation. Matilda Heron was doing some fine work in Milman's "Fazio," and the play of "The Stranger" held audiences spell-bound. Then there were lectures for the more sober-minded people; and you heard youngish men who were to be famous afterward. Spirit-rappings had fallen a trifle into disfavour; and phrenology was making converts. It was the proper thing to go to Fowler's and have your head examined, and get a chart, which sort of settled you until something else came along. Young ladies were going into Combe's physiology and hygiene and cold bathing. Some very hardy and courageous women were studying medicine. Emerson was in a certain way rivalling Carlyle. Wendell Phillips was enchanting the cities with his silver tongue. There had been Brooke Farm; and Margaret Fuller had flashed across the world, married her Italian lover, who fought while she wrote for liberty; and husband, wife, and child had met their tragic death in very sight of her native land. People were thinking really great thoughts; and there was a ferment of moral, transcendental, and aesthetical philosophy. Women met to discuss them in each other's parlours, prefiguring the era of clubs. Alice and Ph[oe]be Cary's receptions had grown to be quite the rage; and Anne C. Lynch was another figure in the social-literary world. Beecher was drawing large audiences in Brooklyn, and telling the old truths in a new fashion. There is always a great seething and tumult before the water fairly boils and precipitates the dregs to the bottom. But whatever comes and goes, young girls are always growing up with the flush and fragrance and elusive fascinations of spring. To-day, a credulous tenderness and overwhelming faith in the past; to-morrow, a little doubtful, hesitatingly anticipative, with the watchwords of "The True, the Good, and the Beautiful;" and still concerned in the latest style of doing one's back hair, and if silver combs and gilt pins would keep in fashion; and flushing celestial rosy red, yet with an odd sense of importance, when men began to lift their hats in a gravely polite manner, as if the laughing, hoydenish girl of yesterday, who strung herself out four or five wide on the sidewalk with books in hand, was the shy, refined, hesitating, utterly delicious young woman of to-day.