people includes a certain amount of refined
cultivation;--it is only that the process is exhausting. Every
woman must have a best-parlor with hair-cloth furniture and a
photograph--book; she must have a piano, or some cheaper substitute;
her little girls must have embroidered skirts and much mathematical
knowledge; her husband must have two or even three hot meals every day
of his life; and yet her house must be in perfect order early in the
afternoon, and she prepared to go out and pay calls, with a black silk
dress and a card-case. In the evening she will go to a concert or a
lecture, and then, at the end of all, she will very possibly sit up
after midnight with her sewing-machine, doing extra shop-work to pay for
little Ella's music-lessons. All this every "capable" New-England woman
will do, or die. She does it, and dies; and then we are astonished
that her vital energy gives out sooner than that of an Irishwoman in a
shanty, with no ambition on earth but to supply her young Patricks with
adequate potatoes.

Now it is useless to attempt to set back the great social flood. The
New-England housekeeper will never be killed by idleness, at any rate;
and if she is exposed to the opposite danger, we must fit her for it,
that is all. There is reason to be hopeful; the human race as a whole is
tending upward, even physically, and if we cannot make our girls healthy
quite yet, we shall learn to do it by-and-by. Meanwhile we must hold
hard to the conviction, that not merely decent health, but even a high
physical training, is a thing thoroughly practicable for both sexes. If
a young girl can tire out her partner in the dance, if a delicate wife
can carry her baby twice as long as her athletic husband, (for certainly
there is nothing in the gymnasium more amazing than the mother's left
arm,) then it is evident that the female frame contains muscular power,
or its equivalent, though it may take music or maternity to bring it
out. But other inducements have proved sufficient, and the results do
not admit of question. The Oriental _bayaderes_, for instance, are
trained from childhood as gymnasts: they carry heavy jars on their
heads, to improve strength, gait, and figure; they fly kites, to acquire
"statuesque attitudes and graceful surprises"; they must learn to lay
the back of the hand flat against the wrist, to partially bend the
arm in both directions at the elbow, and, inclining the whole person
backward from the waist, to