"I trust you will believe me when I assure you that nothing was farther from my mind; but you were so small, I supposed you were a little girl, and so, without thinking, I called you so; it is so dark I could not see your face." "All right, sir; but my husband would have been very angry if he had heard you call me a little girl." Born of the same parents, fed at the same table, educated at the same school, why, in America, does a man weigh fifty pounds more than a woman? I know a good many young ladies, very active in the matrimonial market, who do not weigh more than ninety pounds, and, poor little silly geese, are squeezing themselves as tight as possible with corsets. This petite size can be accounted for. Nothing, to my mind, is plainer. Exercise is the great law of development Our girls have no adequate exercise. Besides, the organs on which growth depends, viz., the lungs, stomach and liver, are reduced, by the corset, to half the natural size and activity. These two causes, with living in the shade, explain the alarming decrease in the size of the average American woman. IDLENESS AMONG GIRLS. My friend Mr.---- has three daughters and two sons. The girls are between eighteen and twenty-eight, one son is thirty-five perhaps, the other is about fourteen. The father keeps a trimmings store. The oldest son is somewhere in the West, the youngest son has already left school to assist his father in the store. The three girls do nothing whatever but dress, play a little, make calls, receive calls, and go a shopping, and, I should add, that during the summer they visit the country, for their health. Twice the father has compromised with his creditors, and he told me a week ago, that sleep, appetite, and hope had all left him, that he had just borrowed two hundred dollars to enable his girls to go up into New Hampshire, that he saw nothing but ruin before him, that he was completely exhausted, that he had recently felt symptoms of paralysis, and that I must tell him, as a friend, what he could do to save himself from insanity. These ejaculations culminated in his covering his face with his hands, and bursting into a flood of tears. "Why, sir," said he, "I owe everybody. Even that faithful creature in my kitchen hasn't had twenty dollars in a year." A FAMILY COUNCIL. He went on: "The other day when the girls got ready to go into the country, we held our first family council. My poor wife, who is all worn out, couldn't bear to have the girls troubled with it. She thought it wouldn't do any good, and that we had better keep it to ourselves. But I said, 'no, for once we will have a fair understanding.'