e flowers of good, staid, sensible
families,--not heathen blossoms nursed in the hot-bed heat of wild,
high-flying, fashionable society. They have been duly and truly taught
and brought up, by good mothers and painstaking aunties, to understand
in their infancy that handsome is that handsome does; that little girls
must not be vain of their pretty red shoes and nice curls, and must
remember that it is better to be good than to be handsome; with all
other wholesome truisms of the kind. They have been to school, and had
their minds improved in all modern ways,--have calculated eclipses, and
read Virgil, Schiller, and La Fontaine, and understand all about the
geological strata, and the different systems of metaphysics,--so that a
person reading the list of their acquirements might be a little appalled
at the prospect of entering into conversation with them. For all these
reasons I listened quite indulgently to the animated conversation that
was going on about--Well!

What _do_ girls generally talk about, when a knot of them get together?
Not, I believe, about the sources of the Nile, or the precession of the
equinoxes, or the nature of the human understanding, or Dante, or
Shakespeare, or Milton, although they have learned all about them in
school; but upon a theme much nearer and dearer,--the one all-pervading
feminine topic ever since Eve started the first toilet of fig-leaves;
and as I caught now and then a phrase of their chatter, I jotted it down
in pure amusement, giving to each charming speaker the name of the bird
under whose colors she was sailing.

"For my part," said little Humming-Bird, "I'm quite worn out with
sewing; the fashions are all _so_ different from what they were last
year, that everything has to be made over."

"Isn't it dreadful!" said Pheasant. "There's my new mauve silk dress! it
was a very expensive silk, and I haven't worn it more than three or four
times, and it really looks quite dowdy; and I can't get Patterson to do
it over for me for this party. Well, really, I shall have to give up
company because I have nothing to wear."

"Who _does_ set the fashions, I wonder," said Humming-Bird; "they seem
now-a-days to whirl faster and faster, till really they don't leave one
time for anything."

"Yes," said Dove, "I haven't a moment for reading, or drawing, or
keeping up my music. The fact is, now-a-days, to keep one's self
properly dressed is all one can do. If I were _grande dame_ now, and had