Oh mercy on me! while I was looking, in came a gentleman, who bowed, and took a chair, and sat smiling on those creatures just as if he was used to it. Talk of blushing--my face was one blaze of fire. While I was wondering what I should do, a girl, or what ought to have been a little girl, came sidling into the room, gave me a look as if I'd been a dog in the wrong place, and went up to the gentleman. "Mamma will be down directly, and has sent me to entertain you," says she, shaking out her short skirts, and almost sitting down on the crimpy hair that half covered them behind. "Ah! I see you are admiring our crouching Venus. Lovely, isn't it? The curving lines are so perfect. The limbs--have you observed the foreshortening of that limb?" The foreshortening of that limb? Mercy on me, I couldn't stand it. Another minute and I should have boxed her ears, for all the blood that burned in my face went tingling down to my fingers. That was too much; so I up and said I would call again, and marched right out of the house. Girls indeed! III. ABOUT GIRLS. Dear Sisters:--You ask a puzzling and painful question--What kind of girls do the children I write about make? My dear friends, girls--modest, rosy, bright-eyed school-girls, such as you are a-thinking of--are scarce as hen's teeth in this great city, and not to be found in profuseness anywhere. They went out with pink calico sun-bonnets, and ain't likely to come in again yet awhile, I tell you! Republican institutions can be carried to a great extent; and our young ones have found it out, and trample down all the good, wholesome old fashions before their little feet quite get out of baby shoes. At this moment I can't find a girl of twelve years old that don't know a thousand times more than her mother, and wouldn't attempt to teach law to her father if he was a judge in the Supreme Court. Yet, it's a shocking truth, the little upstarts don't know how to read like Christians, or spell half their words. The tip-top fashionable school-marms here are quite above teaching such common things as reading and spelling, and turn up their noses at any study that hasn't some "ology" or "phy" at the end of it. I should just like to have a string of the girls that walk in squads up and down the Fifth Avenue, with short dresses and hair streaming loose down their backs, in a district school-house, with no books but Webster's Spelling-book and the Columbian Reader. Wouldn't I astonish them with science? I guess they would understand the meaning of a spelling-class by the time I got through with 'em!