mbles
into a sleep at the end of August, and lies torpid until the spring?
She goes into the world every night, and sits watching her marriageable
daughters dancing till long after dawn. She has a nursery of little
ones, very likely, at home, to whom she administers example and
affection; having an eye likewise to bread-and-milk, catechism, music
and French, and roast leg of mutton at one o'clock; she has to call
upon ladies of her own station, either domestically or in her
public character, in which she sits upon Charity Committees, or Ball
Committees, or Emigration Committees, or Queen's College Committees, and
discharges I don't know what more duties of British stateswomanship.
She very likely keeps a poor-visiting list; has conversations with the
clergyman about soup or flannel, or proper religious teaching for the
parish; and (if she lives in certain districts) probably attends early
church. She has the newspapers to read, and, at least, must know what
her husband's party is about, so as to be able to talk to her neighbour
at dinner; and it is a fact that she reads every new book that comes
out; for she can talk, and very smartly and well, about them all, and
you see them all upon her drawing-room table. She has the cares of her
household besides--to make both ends meet; to make the girls' milliner's
bills appear not too dreadful to the father and paymaster of the family;
to snip off, in secret, a little extra article of expenditure here
and there, and convey it, in the shape of a bank-note, to the boys
at college or at sea; to check the encroachments of tradesmen and
housekeepers' financial fallacies; to keep upper and lower servants from
jangling with one another, and the household in order. Add to this, that
she has a secret taste for some art or science, models in clay, makes
experiments in chemistry, or plays in private on the violoncello,--and
I say, without exaggeration, many London ladies are doing this,--and you
have a character before you such as our ancestors never heard of, and
such as belongs entirely to our era and period of civilisation. Ye gods!
how rapidly we live and grow! In nine months, Mr. Paxton grows you a
pineapple as large as a portmanteau, whereas a little one, no bigger
than a Dutch cheese, took three years to attain his majority in
old times; and as the race of pineapples so is the race of man.
Hoiaper--what's the Greek for a pineapple, Warrington?"

"Stop, for mercy's sake, stop with th