How few of perfectly healthy girls do we see among all those with whom we are each severally acquainted.  Tight lacing, began in early childhood, is one of the chief of evils.  You ask a girl of twelve years if she is not too tightly dressed, and the reply is “no;” and the mother is sure to argue that if the girl does not complain it is none of the father’s business to meddle.  The fact is, the child has been gradually brought to that state of unconsciousness of any discomfort by having been subjected to this abominable process from a very tender age, and being continued each year, the waist is scarce half the natural size it should have been at womanhood.  Take a country girl who has grown up free from this practice, and has a well-developed frame, and put on her the harness of her fashionable sister, and draw it to the point the latter is accustomed to wear it, and you shall see whether there is any wincing or no.  The argument of these unreasoning mothers is that of the Chinese, who dwarf their children’s feet by beginning at an early period, and, doubtless, if these youths were similarly questioned, they, too, would complain of no inconvenience.

In the management and care of children, fond parents seem, in these later years, little else than a bundle of absurdities.  For instance, take children of from three to ten years, and you shall see, in a majority of cases, when dressed for the street, their backs ladened with fold on fold of the warmest clothing, while their poor knees are both bare and blue.

Ah! we forget, perhaps, that the physician and undertaker must live; and then the army of nurses and others, too, are to be provided for, quite as the fashionable lady would make reply to any impertinence in matters of her dress, that it kept an army of sewing-girls employed who would otherwise be left to starve!

One of our most vigorous writers, treating this subject, says:—­

“Showy wardrobe, excessive work with the needle, where it is done to gratify a taste for display, or morbid fancy for exquisite work, is a crime.  Shoulders are bent, spines are curved, the blood, lacking its supplies of oxygen, loses vitality and creeps sluggishly through the veins, carrying no vivid color to the cheek and lips, giving no activity to the brain, no fire to the eye.  Let women throw away their fancy work, dispense to a degree with ruffles and tucks, and, in a dress that will admit of a long breath, walk in the clear bracing air.

“Mothers should begin early to lay the foundations of health.  Children should have plenty of vigorous, joyous exercise out of doors.  They should have romping, rollicking fun every day, at the same time giving exercise to every part of the body, and a healthy tone to the spirits.  The body and soul are so intimately blended that exercise for the one is of little value when the other is repressed.  Thus the limbs will become well knit and beautifully rounded, the flesh will be firm and rosy, and the whole frame