[Illustration: A pianist's great feet] The literary appreciations of the witty girl are few. She is apt, in appraising poets, to take them at their weakest rather than at their strongest. She judges Wordsworth by his "Idiot Boy," and she would be capable of passing sentence on Cowper as having cut in his door three holes of different sizes for his tom-cat, his tabby cat and his kitten. [Illustration: She thinks him a victim of heredity WORDSWORTH'S IDIOT BOY] Yet another tendency of the witty girl which must be strongly deprecated, is to harp on phrases which may have once had a faintly comical ring, but which have long lost it; such phrases as, "Where does this live?" applied to inanimate objects, or, "Hang on to this," used in reference to objects held in the hand. It would be interesting to know who first evolved these mild witticisms destined to win such enduring popularity. The singular phraseology of girls not minded to confine themselves to English of the academies has of late been made the subject of much comment. There follow here some specimens of it in which the facetious was aimed at, and in some cases not unsuccessfully. Wordsworth was, by a Scotch Annie, described as a "baa-lamby;" a Welsh Beatrice described "a most wizened farewell concert;" her impressions of Holland were summed up by an English Madge in the words "flobby bread and flobby wall-paper," and an Irish Constance, writing to her home in Ireland from a school in France attended by her with her sister Ethel, penned this anomalous statement, "We are here six Irish, counting Ethel, and six English, counting me." [Illustration: Wordsworth looking sheepish] Both these girls were the daughters of an Irishman and an Englishwoman. She who was accounted of the six English had been born in her mother's country, while she who was accounted of the six Irish had been born in that of her father. In drawing the fine line of distinction which made her English and her sister Irish, the young maid Constance aimed not at precision but at wit, and, as behoved her father's daughter, she did not aim at wit in vain. Her letter was read with laughter. In almost all girls' letters there is a marked quality of phrasing which, even when not witty, is mirth-provoking. Take the following: "Papa has just come back from London, and has brought me a very thin umbrella, with a steel stick running through it, just simply frightfully elegant; also a pair of shoes, fawn antelope, embroidered with gold beads. You needn't sniff." Sniff, indeed? Perish the thought! "Tinpot" used as an adjective does not spoil the following curious bit of description penned by a London girl during a stay in Ryde: "I am enjoying myself very much in a quiet, non-dissipated, tinpot way--walking on the sea-wall and the pier, reading Carlyle and Marion Crawford, and making little vests for Kilburn orphans." [Illustration: A dissipated tinpot] Only a girl could have written that, and of its kind it is admirable.