ing: 'Here is a man trying to fill a
bushel with chaff. Now if I fill it with wheat first, it is better
than to fight him.' This apothegm contains in it the whole of what I
would say on the subject of amusements."

IX

DRESS, OR WHO MAKES THE FASHIONS

The door of my study being open, I heard in the distant parlor a sort
of flutter of silken wings, and chatter of bird-like voices, which
told me that a covey of Jenny's pretty young street birds had just
alighted there. I could not forbear a peep at the rosy faces that
glanced out under pheasants' tails, doves' wings, and nodding
humming-birds, and made one or two errands in that direction only that
I might gratify my eyes with a look at them.

Your nice young girl, of good family and good breeding, is always a
pretty object, and, for my part, I regularly lose my heart (in a sort
of figurative way) to every fresh, charming creature that trips across
my path. All their mysterious rattletraps and whirligigs,--their curls
and networks and crimples and rimples and crisping-pins,--their little
absurdities, if you will,--have to me a sort of charm, like the tricks
and stammerings of a curly-headed child. I should have made a very
poor censor if I had been put in Cato's place: the witches would have
thrown all my wisdom into some private chip-basket of their own, and
walked off with it in triumph. Never a girl bows to me that I do not
see in her eye a twinkle of confidence that she could, if she chose,
make an old fool of me. I surrender at discretion on first sight.

Jenny's friends are nice girls,--the flowers of good, staid,
sensible families,--not heathen blossoms nursed in the hot-bed heat of
wild, high-flying, fashionable society. They have been duly and truly
taught and brought up, by good mothers and painstaking aunties, to
understand in their infancy that handsome is that handsome does; that
little girls must not be vain of their pretty red shoes and nice
curls, and must remember that it is better to be good than to be
handsome; with all other wholesome truisms of the kind. They have been
to school, and had their minds improved in all modern ways,--have
calculated eclipses, and read Virgil, Schiller, and La Fontaine,
and understand all about the geological strata, and the different
systems of metaphysics,--so that a person reading the list of
their acquirements might be a little appalled at the prospect of
entering into conversation with them. For all thes