nd hands. This is
the great fault of American mothers. They swamp themselves in a slough
of self-sacrifice. They are smothered in their own sweetness. They
dash into domesticity with an impetus and abandonment that annihilate
themselves. They sink into their families like a light in a poisonous
well, and are extinguished.

One hears much complaint of the direction and character of female
education. It is dolefully affirmed that young ladies learn how to
sing operas but not how to keep house,--that they can conjugate Greek
verbs, but cannot make bread,--that they are good for pretty toying,
but not for homely using. Doubtless there is foundation for this
remark, or it would never have been made. But I have been in the East
and the West, and the North and the South; I know that I have seen the
best society, and I am sure I have seen very bad, if not the worst; and
I never met a woman whose superior education, whose piano, whose
pencil, whose German, or French, or any school-accomplishments, or even
whose novels, clashed with her domestic duties. I have read of them in
books; I did hear of one once; but I never met one,--not one. I have
seen women, through love of gossip, through indolence, through sheer
famine of mental PABLUM, leave undone things that ought to be
done,--rush to the assembly, lecture-room, the sewing-circle, or
vegetate in squalid, shabby, unwholesome homes; but I never saw
education run to ruin. So it seems to me that we are needlessly
alarmed in that direction.

I have seen scores and scores of women leave school, leave their piano
and drawing and fancy-work, and all manner of pretty and pleasant
things, and marry and bury themselves. You hear of them about six
times in ten years, and there is a baby each time. They crawl out of
the farther end of the ten years, sallow and wrinkled and lank,--teeth
gone, hair gone, roses gone, plumpness gone,--freshness, and vivacity,
and sparkle, everything that is dewy, and springing, and spontaneous,
gone, gone, gone forever. This our Tract-Society book puts very
prettily. "She wraps herself in the robes of infantile simplicity,
and, burying her womanly nature in the tomb of childhood, patiently
awaits the sure-coming resurrection in the form of a noble,
high-minded, world-stirring son, or a virtuous, lovely daughter. The
nursery is the mother's chrysalis. Let her abide for a little season,
and she shall emerge triumphantly, with ethereal wings and a