oluble,
mystery is standing on one's very hearth-rug. No wonder great
philosophers have spent their lives in vain in looking for the riddle of
existence, when they never dreamt of looking for it at home. Why woman
is so peculiarly mysterious, why the laws of her nature are so specially
unintelligible to a common world, we have not yet been informed. What is
asserted is simply the fact of this mystery, and before that great fact
criticism retires.

All that remains for it is to pray and to wait, to hope for a revelation
from within, since it is forbidden any exploration from without. Some
prophetess, no doubt a veiled prophetess herself, will arise to lift the
veil of her sex. Woman, let us hope, will at last unriddle woman. Smit
by the sunbeams, or rather by the moonbeams, of self-discovery, the
Sphinx of modern times will reveal in weird and superhuman music the
mystery of her existence.

MISTRESS AND MAID ON DRESS AND UNDRESS.

No one with a soul to appreciate the extra-judicial utterances of Mr.
Samuel Warren can have forgotten the memorable lament over the decline
and fall of the fine old English maid-servant with which, some years
ago, he introduced some cases of petty larceny to the notice of the
grand-jurors of Hull. The alarm sounded with such touching eloquence
from the judgment-seat was taken up last autumn, if we remember, by a
venerable Countess, who, in an address to an assemblage of Cumbrian
lasses, aspirants to the kitchen and the dairy, took occasion to read
them a lecture on the duty of dressing with the simplicity befitting
their station. Both the learned Recorder and the venerable Countess were
animated by the best intentions. Their advice was excellent, and we
sincerely trust that it may have induced the neat-handed Phyllis of the
North to curb her immoderate taste for finery. These sporadic warnings
seem likely to ripen at last into action.

From a letter lately inserted in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, we learn that
a "Clergyman's Wife" has long been brooding in silent indignation over
"the present disgraceful style of dress among female servants." Her
disgust finds vent in a manifesto to the mistresses of Great Britain,
in which, after painting the evil in the darkest possible colors, she
ends by suggesting a remedy for it. Dress, we are told, among "the lower
orders of females," has arrived at a pitch which has wholly changed the
aspect and character of our towns and country villages. Neit