quipment has grown, we fancy each of these self-devoted mothers
to be an Arnold Winkelried, receiving in her martyr-breast the points of a
dozen different cards, and shouting, "Make way for liberty!" For is it not
securing liberty to have cleared off a dozen calls from your list, and
found nobody at home?

If this sort of thing goes on, who can tell where the paper warfare shall
end? If ladies may leave cards for their husbands, who are never seen out
of Wall Street, except when they are seen at their clubs; or for their
sons, who never forsake their billiards or their books,--why can they not
also leave them for their ancestors, or for their remotest posterity? Who
knows but people may yet drop cards in the names of the grandchildren whom
they only wish for, or may reconcile hereditary feuds by interchanging
pasteboard in behalf of two hostile grandparents who died half a century
ago?

And there is another social observance in which the introduction of the
card system may yet be destined to save much labor,--the attendance on
fashionable churches. Already, it is said, a family may sometimes reconcile
devout observance with a late breakfast, by stationing the family carriage
near the church-door--empty. Really, it would not be a much emptier
observance to send the cards alone by the footman; and doubtless in the
progress of civilization we shall yet reach that point. It will have many
advantages. The _effete_ of society, as some cruel satirist has called
them, may then send their orisons on pasteboard to as many different
shrines as they approve; thus insuring their souls, as it were, at several
different offices. Church architecture may be simplified, for it will
require nothing but a card-basket. The clergyman will celebrate his solemn
ritual, and will then look in that convenient receptacle for the names of
his fellow-worshippers, as a fine lady, after her "reception," looks over
the cards her footman hands her, to know which of her dear friends she has
been welcoming. Religion, as well as social proprieties, will glide
smoothly over a surface of glazed pasteboard; and it will be only very
humble Christians, indeed, who will do their worshipping in person, and
will hold to the worn-out and obsolete practice of "No Cards."

SOME WORKING-WOMEN

It is almost a stereotyped remark, that the women of the more fashionable
and worldly class, in America, are indolent, idle, incapable, and live
feeble and lazy lives