eling of uselessness is an
extremely unpleasant one. Tom Hood, in a very humorous paper, describes
a most accomplished schoolmistress, a teacher of all the arts and crafts
which are supposed to make up fine gentlewomen, who is stranded in a
rude German inn, with her father writhing in the anguish of a severe
attack of gastric inflammation. The helpless lady gazes on her suffering
parent, longing to help him, and thinking over all her various little
store of accomplishments, not one of which bear the remotest relation to
the case. She could knit him a bead-purse, or make him a guard-chain, or
work him a footstool, or festoon him with cut tissue-paper, or sketch
his likeness, or crust him over with alum crystals, or stick him over
with little rosettes of red and white wafers; but none of these being
applicable to his present case, she sits gazing in resigned imbecility,
till finally she desperately resolves to improvise him some gruel, and,
after a laborious turn in the kitchen,--after burning her dress and
blacking her fingers,--succeeds only in bringing him a bowl of _paste_!

"Not unlike this might be the feeling of many and elegant and
accomplished woman, whose education has taught and practised her in
everything that woman ought to know, except those identical ones which
fit her for the care of a home, for the comfort of a sick-room; and so I
say again, that, whatever a woman may be in the way of beauty and
elegance, she must have the strength and skill of a _practical worker_,
or she is nothing. She is not simply to _be_ the beautiful,--she is to
_make_ the beautiful, and preserve it; and she who makes and she who
keeps the beautiful must be able _to work_, and to know how to work.
Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and
refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile
toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings. If a true
lady makes even a plate of toast, in arranging a _petit souper_ for her
invalid friend, she does it as a lady should. She does not cut
blundering and uneven slices; she does not burn the edges; she does not
deluge it with bad butter, and serve it cold; but she arranges and
serves all with an artistic care, with a nicety and delicacy, which make
it worth one's while to have a lady friend in sickness.

"And I am glad to hear that Monsieur Blot is teaching classes of New
York ladies that cooking is not a vulgar kitchen toil, to be left to
bl