The irritability which bad habits, bad food, and the want of fresh air develop, needs the counterpoise of a fresh excitement--so a German, the opera, or a tragedy, occupies her evening hours. Three or four days in the week, at least, she is up till midnight, and rises just in time to get to school at nine. She never stands in the cool evening air to see the red sun sink below the hills; she misses the holy calm of the early morning, which falls upon a flushed and heated life as its dews fall on the flowers. Dissipation, either mental or physical, crowds every cranny of her life. Parents object to every lesson out of school, so the whole period of preparation and recitation is pressed into the school-hours. Her dress is wholly unsuited to health; and when I say this, I wish to be understood as saying nothing in favor of bloomers or any other special dress. An intelligent woman can decide for herself and her children as to what need of change there is in her dress; and many of us have worn for half a century clothes that were loose, well adjusted, and healthful, without drawing attention to any peculiarity. Nor must there be any tyrannical dictation on this subject. Some of us prefer to rest our clothes upon our shoulders; some of us are only comfortable when they depend upon the hips. It cannot be denied that the heavily-weighted skirts now in vogue are uncleanly and unwholesome, even when worn short; and while school-girls elaborate, friz, powder, and puff their hair like their elders, and trim their dresses to such excess, it will be impossible for them to find time for consecutive study. Every separate curl, lace, or fold, becomes a separate cause of worry; and "worry" lies at the bottom of American degeneracy, male and female. Every heart in this country came to a sudden pause the other day, when the name of Agassiz was moaned out by the funeral-bells of Cambridge. Who ever worked harder than he? "Without haste, yet without rest," his summer's recreation became the hardest work of the world; but in his life an ever-flowing cheerfulness, and a genial welcome for any honest soul, showed the healthfulness of his busy walk. If anything shortened his three-score and ten years, it was the care and anxiety which insufficient appropriation and political indifference or chicanery crowded into his later life. The scholar, young or old, must keep a calm and well-poised mind. Let our mothers consider whether this is possible to children upon whom the follies of mature life are crowded in infancy.