ame--I ought to say
guilt--of this terrible and reckless folly.

It is a great fault with American woman, that they worship so blindly at
the shrine of Fashion. They sacrifice taste and comfort, time and money,
health and happiness, character and life, on this graceless and godless
altar, What shopping--what trimming--what sewing and stuffing and
padding--what bowing and scraping--what simpering and oiling and
scenting--what cooking and spicing and preserving--what eating and
sipping and drinking--what wasting and lying and cheating--what
gossiping, slandering, and abusing--what forging, straining, and
overreaching--what miserable time-serving and eye-serving at the expense
of all that is pure and noble in the human heart and life, are resorted
to keep pace with the changing moods of Fashion! What is there in our
highly civilized life that escapes the palsying touch of Fashion?
_Dress_, what is it? Fashion from head to foot. No matter if it outrages
all physiology, puts hands around the lungs, gauze on the feet, and
hangs multitudinous skirts upon the most vital and yielding portions of
the female system. What of all that? Fashion is superior to health and
life. What if it shrivel a woman into a mummy, and fade her into a
ghost, and plant in her vitals the never-dying worm of consumption! What
is beauty and physical womanhood to Fashion? Who would not rather fade
at twenty-five, and die at thirty, than to be out of the Fashion?

_Food_, what is it good for if it is not in Fashion? If it is not
greased and peppered, shortened and raised, concentrated and almost
distilled, and then taken at hours of _ton_, and in wholesale
quantities, of what avail is it? Better have the dyspepsia than eat
coarse bread! What woman would not rather have a nervous debility than
dispense with hot coffee and strong tea? Then, to refuse roast beef and
baked ham would be very ungenteel! A bilious attack would be much more
fashionable. It would be unwomanly not to have an animal die every time
she was hungry, so that her life might pick the bones of death. It is
very poetical to realize that life flowers on the sepulcher of death.

_Friendship_, its links must be forged on Fashion's anvil, or it is good
for nothing. How shocking to be friendly with an unfashionable lady! It
will never do. How soon one would lose caste! No matter if her mind is a
treasury of gems, and her heart a flower-garden of love, and her life a
hymn of grace and praise, i