TUESDAY, JAN. 16. The climate on the seaboard is remarkably equable; it varies at Monterey, the year round, but little from sixty. You never lay aside your woollen apparel, and always feel ready for a bear-hunt, or any other field-sport that may tempt your taste or skill. Till the Americans came here there was hardly a house in the town which contained a fireplace; even the cooking was done in a detached apartment, seemingly to avoid the straggling rays of its grate. The children ran about in the winter months without a shoe, and in their little cotton slips, the perfect pictures of health. The girl of seventeen, the mother of forty, and the venerable lady, who had reached her threescore and ten, were never seen hovering around a fire: they were at their household affairs, in apartments where a coal had never been kindled; or in their gardens, where the last rain had revived their drooping plants; or out in the woods at pic-nics, where the very birds sung out in rivalry of their jocund mirth. Health spread its rose in the cheek, and elastic life thrilled in the bounding limb. The birth of a child was only a momentary pause in this scene of pleasurable activity, and more than compensated for its brief encroachment in a new bud of being, to be clustered among the rest—now blooming in fragrant life around the parent tree. Think of this, ye mothers who cloister your daughters in air-tight parlors, with furnaces blowing in hot steam from below. It is no wonder they wither from their cradles, and that their bridal couch is often ashes. Your mistaken tenderness, vanity, and pride have supplied death with trophies long enough. Look here to California; among all these mothers and daughters, there is not one where the cankerworm of that disease is at work which has spread sorrow and dismay around your hearths. The insidious disguises and sapping advances of the consumption are not known here; I have not yet met with the first instance where this disease, contracted here, has found a victim. It is your in-door habits, hot parlors, prunellas, and twisting corsets, that clothe this generation with weeds, and bequeath to the next constitutions that fall like grass under the scythe of death. If your daughters won’t take out-door exercise from persuasion, then drive them forth as the guardian angel of Eden your erring progenitrix. It may have been that the development of her physical forces, as well as retributive justice, induced her expulsion from the luxurious roses, the balmy airs, and lulling streams of her first abode. But your Eves will come back again, and sparkling eyes, and buoyant spirits, and a vigorous pulse will commend your maternal wisdom; and when a man, worthy of your confidence and the affections of your daughters, wants a wife, his choice will not lie in a group of valetudinarians. He carries off a bird that floats a strong wing, and that can sing in concert with him as they build the