re
abundance of openings for women. What is the cause of the outcry and
distress? How is it that we hear of women starving, driven to vice and
crime by want, when so many doors of useful and profitable employment
stand open to them?"

"The question would easily be solved," said my wife, "if you could
once see the kind and class of women who thus suffer and starve.
There may be exceptions, but too large a portion of them are girls
and women who can or will do no earthly thing well,--and, what is
worse, are not willing to take the pains to be taught to do anything
well. I will describe to you one girl, and you will find in every
intelligence-office a hundred of her kind to five thoroughly trained
ones.

"Imprimis: she is rather delicate and genteel-looking, and you may
know from the arrangement of her hair just what the last mode is
of disposing of rats or waterfalls. She has a lace bonnet with
roses, a silk mantilla, a silk dress trimmed with velvet, a white
skirt with sixteen tucks and an embroidered edge, a pair of cloth
gaiters, underneath which are a pair of stockings without feet, the
only pair in her possession. She has no under-linen, and sleeps at
night in the working-clothes she wears in the day. She never seems
to have in her outfit either comb, brush, or tooth-brush of her
own,--neither needles, thread, scissors, nor pins; her money, when she
has any, being spent on more important articles, such as the lace
bonnet or silk mantilla, or the rats and waterfalls that glorify
her head. When she wishes to sew, she borrows what is needful of a
convenient next neighbor; and if she gets a place in a family as
second girl, she expects to subsist in these respects by borrowing of
the better-appointed servants, or helping herself from the family
stores.

"She expects, of course, the very highest wages, if she condescends to
live out; and by help of a trim outside appearance, and the many
vacancies that are continually occurring in households, she gets
places, where her object is to do just as little of any duty assigned
to her as possible, to hurry through her performances, put on her
fine clothes, and go a-gadding. She is on free-and-easy terms with all
the men she meets, and ready at jests and repartee, sometimes far from
seemly. Her time of service in any one place lasts indifferently from
a fortnight to two or three months, when she takes her wages, buys
her a new parasol in the latest style, and goes back to the