Deformity of principle, as well as deformity of person, may sometimes be the mother of Fashion. Thus it is stated by an old French writer, that “the use of great purfles and slit coates was introduced by wanton women;” but he adds, with great unction, that the fashion of these lemans had been adopted by the princesses and ladies of England; and with them he trusts that it will long remain. The same author shows how a fair lady, by following the fashion thus lightly set, became the victim of Satan himself. It must be premised that the author’s daughters had been very desirous of indulging in furred garments, and purfles, and slashed coats; and as the father saved himself from a long bill at the dressmaker’s by telling the following story, I calculate upon the gratitude of all sires similarly beset, if the telling of it here, and by them to their respective young ladies, should be followed by the desired consequences,—which I do not at all anticipate. A certain knight having lost his wife, and not being at all sure as to the locality in which her spirit rested, applied to a devout hermit, who picked up a living by revealing that sort of secret. In our own days, the Rev. Mr. Godfrey professes to get at the same mystery by dint of table-turning. Well; the reverend gentleman’s ancestor, the hermit, thought upon the question by going to sleep over it; and when he awoke, he informed the knight that he had been, in a vision, to the tribunal of souls, and that he had there learned all about the lady in question. He had seen St. Michael and Lucifer standing opposite each other, and between them a pair of scales, in one of which was placed the lady’s soul, with its select assortment of good deeds; and in the other, all her evil actions. A fiend, with all her garments and jewellery in his possession, was looking on. The beam of the balance had not yet made a movement, when the impetuous St. Michael was about generously to claim the soul thus weighed. Thereupon Lucifer urbanely remarked, that he would take the liberty of informing his once-esteemed friend of a fact probably unknown to him. “This woman,” said he, “had no less than ten gowns and as many coats; and you know as well as I do, my good Michael, that half the quantity would have sufficed for her requirements, and would not have been contrary to the law of God.” St. Michael looked rather offended at its being supposed that he knew anything about women and their gear, and suggested that too much intercourse with both had been the ruin of his ex-colleague.