If this picture seems absurd, then, it must be admitted that there is a reason in nature why the dress of woman should forever remain different from that of man, in the same manner that the hand of her Creator has shaped her delicate limbs and golden hair differently from the rugged organization of man. Woman was meant to be more than a worker; she was meant for the poet and artist of life; she was meant to be the charmer; and that is the reason, dear Miss Minerva, why to the end of time you cannot help it that women always will, and must, give more care and thought to dress than men. To be sure, this runs into a thousand follies and extravagances; but in this as in everything else the remedy is not extirpation, but direction. Certainly my pretty wife's pretty toilets had a success in our limited circle, which might possibly have been denied in fashionable society at Saratoga and Newport. She was beauty, color, and life to our little world, and followed by almost adoring eyes wherever she went. It was as real an accession of light and joy to the simple ways of our household to have her there, as a choice picture, or a marvelous strain of music. My wife had to perfection the truly artistic gift of dress. Had she lived in Robinson Crusoe's island with no one to look at her but the paroquets and the monkeys, and with no mirror but a pool of water, she would have made a careful toilet every day, from the mere love of beauty; and it was delightful to see how a fresh, young, charming woman, by this faculty of adornment, seemed to make the whole of the sober, old house like a picture or a poem. "She is like the blossom on a cactus," said my Uncle Jacob. "We have come to our flower, in her; we have it in us; we all like it, but she brings it out; she is our blossom." In fact, it was charming to see the delight of the two sober, elderly matrons, my mother and my aunt, in turning over and surveying the pretty things of her toilet. My mother, with all her delicate tastes and love of fineness and exquisiteness, had lived in these respects the self-denied life of a poor country minister, who never has but one "best pocket handkerchief," and whom one pair of gloves must last through a year. It was a fresh little scene of delight to see the two way-worn matrons in the calm, silvery twilight of their old age, sitting like a pair of amicable doves on the trunks in our room, while my wife displayed to them all her little store of fineries, and all three chatted them over with as whole-hearted a zeal as if finery were one of the final ends in creation.