Another and still stranger phase is to be found in some of our small sea-side ports and fishing-villages, where it is considered a disgrace to girls to go into service, though it is not derogatory to their dignity to assume male attire and pick cockles all day on a mud-bank. The men are held to have formed a _mésalliance_ if they marry gentlemen’s servants; a falling-off which, if their wives die, they may retrieve by a second marriage with a lady who (emphatically) ‘has never been in service.’ But no doubt it is natural enough that the people should copy their superiors’ worship of the Proper Thing in this as in the other fashions, though they have different notions of what the Proper Thing really is. We hope to have established the fact that this tyrant has nothing to do with virtue. Its rule has often flourished most where virtue has been at the lowest ebb. How brilliantly, for example, the Proper Thing reigned in the court of Louis XIV., which was certainly not a school of morality. Neither has it much to do with what may be justly called _les convenances_; we mean those smaller constraints and proprieties which young American ladies set aside without any deterioration of their real goodness, but with a certain detriment to their manners and maidenly charms. Originally, no doubt, the Proper Thing sprang from a sense of true propriety, but it has degenerated so far as sometimes even to contradict that sense; and virtue can stand all the better without such a whimsical attempt at a buttress. Of course it will always set itself up more or less as a buttress, and as necessary to virtue and propriety, unless the real things should make such progress as to crowd out the counterfeit. But we fear that there never will be a civilisation so pure and simple that delicacy and honour will, of their own goodness, take the place of the true Proper Thing. INSTANCES OF LONGEVITY. We had been putting to rights an old surgery that it might be turned into a dwelling-house. A complete set of drawers, with names of drugs and medical condiments printed thereon, had been torn from the wall; vast heaps of bones, used formerly for scientific purposes, had been taken from a large mouldy cupboard, and had thereafter received Christian burial in a corner of our garden. All had been done that was possible to sweeten and purify the ancient place, when we discovered on a certain shelf several dusty and stained volumes, which looked to our eyes interesting and curious. One of the volumes, entitled _Health and Longevity_, was secured at once by my young children, and some extraordinary woodcuts of venerable individuals, more or less hideous, were cut therefrom, the volume itself being then thrown aside: Some notes regarding these ancient beings may not be uninteresting.