crimpy hair that half covered them behind. "Ah! I see you are admiring
our crouching Venus. Lovely, isn't it? The curving lines are so perfect.
The limbs--have you observed the foreshortening of that limb?"

The foreshortening of that limb? Mercy on me, I couldn't stand it.
Another minute and I should have boxed her ears, for all the blood that
burned in my face went tingling down to my fingers. That was too much;
so I up and said I would call again, and marched right out of the house.
Girls indeed!

III.

ABOUT GIRLS.

Dear Sisters:--You ask a puzzling and painful question--What kind of
girls do the children I write about make?

My dear friends, girls--modest, rosy, bright-eyed school-girls, such as
you are a-thinking of--are scarce as hen's teeth in this great city, and
not to be found in profuseness anywhere. They went out with pink calico
sun-bonnets, and ain't likely to come in again yet awhile, I tell you!
Republican institutions can be carried to a great extent; and our young
ones have found it out, and trample down all the good, wholesome old
fashions before their little feet quite get out of baby shoes. At this
moment I can't find a girl of twelve years old that don't know a
thousand times more than her mother, and wouldn't attempt to teach law
to her father if he was a judge in the Supreme Court. Yet, it's a
shocking truth, the little upstarts don't know how to read like
Christians, or spell half their words. The tip-top fashionable
school-marms here are quite above teaching such common things as reading
and spelling, and turn up their noses at any study that hasn't some
"ology" or "phy" at the end of it.

I should just like to have a string of the girls that walk in squads up
and down the Fifth Avenue, with short dresses and hair streaming loose
down their backs, in a district school-house, with no books but
Webster's Spelling-book and the Columbian Reader. Wouldn't I astonish
them with science? I guess they would understand the meaning of a
spelling-class by the time I got through with 'em!

As for arithmetic, they don't know what it is in these high-falutin
seminaries; mathematics is the word; A B roots and squaring circles, as
if circles ever would be square. Of course they can't, having been tried
and kept round as an O all the time. But these A's and B's, and roots
and such like, are considered as arithmetic for girls here; so the end
of it is, they can, maybe, tell you how many square f