glorious woman capable of keeping the house, and of guiding the man with womanly strength. Ah, it is a mistake. America is the land of homes. Our undeveloped territory offers to every man a farm. Men and women need not to be cooped up in garrets or shut up in cellars, if they will but possess the spirit of those who sought in this Western world a home, and who, as they toiled with the axe, the plough, and the loom, "Shook the depths of the forest gloom With their hymns of lofty cheer." The cause of this discontent is apparent. There is something in the commonplaces of fashionable life which turns woman from the real to the unreal, from the substantial to the superficial, which smothers all originality of thought, and makes her a simple reproduction in appearance, if not in disposition, of the "Anonyma," with her meretricious beauty and dashing toilets. Is it well for woman to subject herself to be criticised as follows? "The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face, whose sole idea of life is a plenty of fun and luxury, and whose dress is the object of such thought and intellect as she possesses. Her main endeavor is to outvie her neighbors. She cares little for advice or counsel. Nothing is too extraordinary, and nothing too extravagant, for her vitiated taste; and things which in themselves would be useful reforms if let alone, become monstrosities worse than those which they have displaced, so soon as she begins to manipulate and improve. If a sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the mud, she raises hers midway to the knee. If there is a reaction against an excess of hair oil, and hair slimy and sticky with grease is thought less nice than if left clean with a healthy crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks hers out on end like certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down her back like Madge Wildfire's, and thinks herself all the more beautiful the nearer she approaches in look to a maniac or a negress! What the _demi-monde_ does in its frantic efforts to excite attention, she also does in imitation. If some fashionable courtesan is reported to have come out with her dress below her shoulder blades, and a gold strap for all the sleeve thought necessary, the girl of the period follows suit next day, and then wonders that men sometimes mistake her for her prototype, or that mothers of girls, not so far gone as herself, refuse her as a companion for their daughters."