of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet by their lives they
evidently think that it is so, and that they are each and all the
keepers of keys which give them a special entrance to the temple of
morality, and by which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser
body of men. Hence they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much
rope, and measure off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit;
they think vile man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things
into his own hand, and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done
in good if in a very narrow faith--that we admit willingly; but we would
call their attention to the difference there is between influence and
interference, which is just the difference between their ideal duty and
their daily practice--between being the salt of the earth and the
blister of the home. We think it only justice to put in a word for those
poor henpecked fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for
Woman's Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man
knuckle under on all occasions, and of making one will serve for two
lives. We assure her that she would get her own way in large matters
much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small ones, and
not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern her, and
have only reference to themselves.

PLAIN GIRLS.

It is beyond all question the tendency of modern society to regard
marriage as the great end and justification of a woman's life. This is
perhaps the single point on which practical and romantic people, who
differ in so many things, invariably agree. Poets, novelists, natural
philosophers, fashionable and unfashionable mothers, meet one another on
the broad common ground of approving universal matrimony; and women from
their earliest years are dedicated to the cultivation of those feminine
accomplishments which are supposed either to be most seductive before
marriage in a drawing-room, or most valuable after marriage in the
kitchen and housekeeper's-room.

It is admitted to be a sort of half necessity in any interesting work of
fiction that its plots, its adventures, and its catastrophes should all
lead up to the marriage of the principal young lady. Sometimes, as in
the case of the celebrated Lilly Dale, the public tolerates a bold
exception to the ordinary rule, on account of the extreme piquancy of
the thing; but no wise novelist ventures habitually to disre