A little spirit and "spunk" would go a great way towards setting the world right. It is not necessary to be a termagant. The firmest will and the stoutest heart may be combined with the gentlest delicacy. Tameness is not the stuff that the finest women are made of. Nobody can be more kind, considerate, or sympathizing towards weakness or weariness than men, if they only know it exists; and it is a wrong to them to go on bolstering them up in their bungling opinions, when a few sensible ideas, wisely administered, would do so much to enlighten them, and reveal the path which needs only to be revealed to secure their unhesitating entrance upon it. It is absurd to suppose that unvarying acquiescence is necessary to secure and retain their esteem, and that a frank avowal of differing opinions, even if they were wrong, would work its forfeiture. A respect held on so frail a tenure were little worth. But it is not so. I believe that manhood and womanhood are too truly harmonious to need iron bands, too truly noble to require the props of falsehood. Truth, simple and sincere, without partiality and without hypocrisy, is the best food for both. If any are to be found on either side too weak to administer or digest it, the remedy is not to mix it with folly or falsehood, for they are poisons, but to strengthen the organisms with wholesome tonics,--not undiluted, perhaps, but certainly unadulterated. O Edmund Sparkler, you builded better than you knew, when you reared eulogiums upon the woman with no nonsense about her. CAMILLA'S CONCERT I, who labor under the suspicion of not knowing the difference between "Old Hundred" and "Old Dan Tucker,"--I, whose every attempt at music, though only the humming of a simple household melody, has, from my earliest childhood, been regarded as premonitory symptom of epilepsy, or, at the very least, hysterics, to be treated with cold water, the bellows, and an unmerciful beating between my shoulders,--I, who can but with much difficulty and many a retrogression make my way among the olden mazes of tenor, alto, treble, bass, and who stand "clean daft" in the resounding confusion of andante, soprano, falsetto, palmetto, pianissimo, akimbo, l'allegro, and il penseroso,--_I_ was bidden to Camilla's concert, and, like a sheep to slaughter, I went.