I rang off and waited. I am a patient person, I waited a whole hour to allow the wire to cool off. Then I called again and this time I was rewarded by hearing at the other end of the wire a faint far-off, fuzzy, mewing sound. It was the voice of the Pussy-Willow! It was Lawrence Sterne, wasn’t it? who wrote, “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” and it is quite a happy thought that the gentle airs that succeed the blustering winds of March, are a Providential concession to the tender nurslings of the April fields. But the Pussy-Willow comes in February and early March and it would be asking too much to expect Providence to temper the wholesome and necessary rigors of these months for the sake of the venturesome kittens of the Willow bough. Who but Providence (or Mr. Hoover) could ever have thought of the happy expedient of providing each and every Pussy-Willow, not only in the United States but also in England, France, Belgium and even Germany, with a warm fur overcoat! And I verily believe that if the Pussy-Willows were lodged on the cold wet ground instead of perched on the high and dry branches, Providence (or Mr. Hoover) would have seen to it that in addition to fur coats they were provided with galoshes. [Illustration] PERNICIOUS PEACHES The Pernicious Peaches whereof we speak are never out of season. They may be seen almost any month of the year on the covers of magazines, devoted to the moral and social uplift of young girls in general, and the American young girl in particular. The February magazine peach crop is usually most abundant—All through the merry month of Saint Valentine they hang on the news-stands, singly or in clusters, and Peaches they are to be sure—Peaches in the stupidest, cheapest, slangiest nonsense of the word. There they hang to quote the redundant Dr. Roget, F. R. S.—“_simpering, smirking, sniggling, giggling, ogling, tittering, prinking, preening, flaunting, flirting, mincing, coquetting, frivoling, attitudinizing, self-conscious artificial, smug, namby-pamby, sentimental, unnatural, stagy, shallow, weak, wanting, soft, sappy, spoony, fatuous, idiotic, imbecile, driveling, blatant, babbling, vacant, foolish, silly, senseless, addle-pated, giddy, childish, chuckle-headed, puerile_,” and, what is above all else inexcusable in a peach—mushy. And these (in journals that set the fashions moral, mental, social and sartorial) for our young American sister at the most impressionable age of her life—the age when, whatever may be her dormant possibilities, she is by her nature irresistibly impelled to pattern herself after the favorite girl of her class in school, or the favorite actress on the stage—to copy her coiffure, her dress, her deportment, even the expression of her face. And how, you ask, can a young girl be harmed by imitating what, however vacuous or silly, is after all only an expression?