Yesterday morning I amused myself with an exercise of a talent I once possessed, but have so neglected that my performance might almost be called an experiment.  I cut out a dress for one of the women.  My education in France—­where, in some important respects, I think girls are better trained than with us—­had sent me home to England, at sixteen, an adept in the female mystery of needlework.  Not only owing to the Saturday’s discipline of clothes mending by all the classes—­while l’Abbe Millot’s history (of blessed, boring memory) was being read aloud, to prevent ’vain babblings,’ and ensure wholesome mental occupation the while—­was I an expert patcher and mender, darner and piecer (darning and marking were my specialities), but the white cotton embroidery of which every French woman has always a piece under her hand pour les momens perdus, which are thus anything but perdus, was as familiar to us as to the Irish cottagers of the present day, and cutting out and making my dresses was among the more advanced branches of the female accomplishment to which I attained.[1] The luxury of a lady’s maid of my own, indulged in ever since the days of my ‘coming out,’ has naturally enough caused my right hand to forget its cunning, and regret and shame at having lost any useful lore in my life made me accede, for my own sake, to the request of one of our multitudinous Dianas and innumerable Chloes to cut out dresses for each of them, especially as they (wonderful to relate) declared themselves able to stitch them if I would do the cutting.  Since I have been on the plantation I have already spent considerable time in what the French call ‘confectioning’ baby bundles, i.e. the rough and very simple tiny habiliments of coarse cotton and scarlet flannel which form a baby’s layette here, and of which I have run up some scores; but my present task was far more difficult.  Chloe was an ordinary mortal negress enough, but Diana might have been the Huntress of the Woods herself, done into the African type.  Tall, large, straight, well-made, profoundly serious, she stood like a bronze statue, while I, mounted on a stool, (the only way in which I could attain to the noble shoulders and bust of my lay figure), pinned and measured, and cut and shaped, under the superintendence of M——­, and had the satisfaction of seeing the fine proportions of my black goddess quite becomingly clothed in a high tight fitting body of the gayest chintz, which she really contrived to put together quite creditably.

[Footnote 1:  Some of our great English ladies are, I know, exquisite needlewomen; but I do not think, in spite of these exceptional examples, that young English ladies of the higher classes are much skilled in this respect at the present day; and as for the democratic daughters of America, who for many reasons might be supposed likely to be well up in such housewifely lore, they are for the most part so ignorant of it that I have heard the most eloquent preacher of the