And yet the fashionable young lady may number among her accomplishments a smattering of French, or a villainous enunciation of Italian; may thrash the piano, with all discordancy, and nurse her poodle dog with infinite grace, and call it very fatiguing, and be obliged to take a nap after dinner, for fear her strength may fail her in the evening, in the waltz with Mr. Alfred Fitzhuggens, who labors under the accomplishments of an imperial and a dandy cane; while the young sewing girl may be devoting diligently sixteen hours out of the weary twenty-four, in earning the most indifferent food for a family of dependents. We wonder if these young ladies while thumbing their gilt prayer-books on Sunday, and lisping over the prayer, “From all blindness of heart, from pride, vain glory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, _Good Lord, deliver us_,” ever think of the meaning and solemn import of the words they are using. We doubt it. Or in the more direct adjuration, “That it may please thee to strengthen those who stand, _and comfort and help the weak hearted_,” they ever think how little their heartlessness to dependents justifies them in putting up the prayer. Or still further, do they ever think of the obligations of that sublime command, in which Christianity sparkles like a divine light, “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” We fear that at many a table where grace is said, the hearts who hear it are utterly graceless in this regard, and that many who are very rigid in paying the formalities of prayer to God, forget the divine injunction, “feed my lambs,” and would rather add an additional hour to the day of toil, and a shilling less to the pay of the toil-worn sewing girl, than to lighten her burdens by a cheerful word or token of encouragement. Not that we wish for a moment to be supposed as intimating that this lack of enlarged charity is wanting in well trained hypocrites only—who do not dishonor religion, but by daily acts prove its truth and beauty, by showing that they are none of Christ’s. The haughty assumption and vulgar domineering is far worse where _all_ restraint is thrown off, and worldliness unmitigated and shameless, in scarlet and effrontery, rides purse proud over the decencies as well as the charities of life, and makes dependency a worse slavery than that of the poor Indian in the mines. The character of a lady is in no way more surely tested than in treatment of her domestics—and, _generally_, in the frequency with which she changes them. Depend upon it—the house in which _nobody_ can be happy, must be a miniature of existence in a darker world. G. R. G. * * * * *