But all this is but a bagatelle to the fashions in deformity which we find among nearly all American women. There are throughout the country numbers of large manufactories which make "corsets"--a peculiar waist and lung compressor, used by nearly every woman in America. These men are as dogmatic as the designers of the fashion-plates. They also issue plates or guides showing new changes, and the women, like sheep, adopt them. The American woman believes that a narrow waist enhances her beauty, and the corset-maker works upon the national weakness and builds creations that put to shame and ridicule the bound feet of the aristocratic Chinese woman. The corset is a lace and ribbon-decorated armor, made either of steel ribs or whale-bone, which fits the waist and clings to the hips. It is laced up, and the degree of tightness depends upon the will or nerve of the wearer. It compresses the heart and lungs, and wearing it is a most barbarous custom--a telling argument against the assumption of high intelligence on the part of the Americans, who, in this respect, rank with the flat-headed Indians of the northwest American coast, whose heads I have seen in their medical offices side by side with a diagram showing the abnormal conditions caused by the corset. A year ago the fiat went forth that the American woman must have wide hips. Presto! there appeared especially devised machinery, advertised in all the journals, accomplishing the condition for those whom nature had not well endowed. Now the dressmaker has decided that they must be narrow-hipped, and half a million dollars in false hips, rubber pads, and other properties are cast aside. No extravaganza is too absurd for these people who are abject slaves to the whimsicalities of the designer, who is a wag in his way, as has been well shown in a story told to me. The designers for a famous man dressmaker in Paris had a habit of taking sketches of the latest creations to their club meetings. One evening a clever caricaturist took a caricature of a fashion showing a woman with enormous and outlandish sleeves. It created a laugh. "As impossible as it is," said the artist, "I will wager a dinner that if I present it seriously to a certain fashion paper they will take it up." This is said to be the history of the "big-sleeve" fashion that really amazed the Americans themselves.