A clever friend, who has spent more time in the study of women’s ways and manners in different countries than one can think profitable, has some unique views on the subject of their walking. He says the haughty women of Old Spain carry their weight mainly on the hips, which gives an indescribable stiffness of demeanor. Americans do the same, throwing the weight a little more on the thigh, without bending the knee. French women carry the weight on the calf of the leg, and the knee bends very much at each step, while the body is carried with the least _balancement_ of the shoulders, and the head, so far from being held like a cockade, or the head of tongs, is easy. _La tête dégagée, les épaules tombante_ is the rule for a good style. Try the difference of contracting the muscles in the calf of the leg in walking, with the knee bent sensibly at each step. The body involuntarily throws itself back, and a lightness of motion is the result, which is impossible with the usual swing of the leg from the hips in the stiff walk of Saxon women. The same authority says that the far-famed serpentine glide of the creole, which travelers admire and vainly try to describe, comes from a peculiar movement of the hips. The weight of the figure is thrown on the loins, and half of the body moves alternately at each step, not in a wriggle, as it is caricatured at the North, but with a soft turn of the shoulders corresponding, and a smoothness which betrays the sensuous temperament and luxurious physique. Such is the walk of the women of Venezuela, Bogota, and La Plata. Such a gait, however, would hardly be accepted in the Champs Elysées as suggestive of high refinement. The women of Alabama and Georgia have traits enough of this walk to make them among the most graceful in the world, as far as carriage goes. The creoles of the Gulf have this sinuous glide, betraying a flexibility of limb which we can scarcely imagine. To gain this pliancy, twisting movements of gymnastics are especially suitable. Gyrations of each limb, the head and body, produce, in a few weeks’ practice, an enviable degree of elasticity, which gives the carriage something more than the up and down, forward and back, straight lines of motion with which ladies ordinarily favor us. A smooth, long step, the weight of the body on the loins, where nature intended it should be, and the legs propelled from thence, without stiffness at the knee or obtrusive motion of the hips, is, probably, the ideal of walking; such as one finds both in a highly trained woman and in the untaught perfection of a South Sea Islander.