can keep her
within the limits of comfortable health: and yet this is the creature
who must undertake family life in a country where it is next to an
absolute impossibility to have _permanent_ domestics. Frequent change,
occasional entire break-downs, must be the lot of the majority of
housekeepers,--particularly those who do not live in cities."

"In fact," said my wife, "we in America have so far got out of the way
of a womanhood that has any vigor of outline or opulence of physical
proportions, that, when we see a woman made as a woman ought to be, she
strikes us as a monster. Our willowy girls are afraid of nothing so much
as growing stout; and if a young lady begins to round into proportions
like the women in Titian's and Giorgione's pictures, she is distressed
above measure, and begins to make secret inquiries into reducing diet,
and to cling desperately to the strongest corset-lacing as her only
hope. It would require one to be better educated than most of our girls
are, to be willing to look like the Sistine Madonna or the Venus of
Milo.

"Once in a while our Italian opera-singers bring to our shores those
glorious physiques which formed the inspiration of Italian painters; and
then American editors make coarse jokes about Barnum's fat woman, and
avalanches, and pretend to be struck with terror at such dimensions.

"We should be better instructed, and consider that Italy does us a
favor, in sending us specimens, not only of higher styles of musical
art, but of a warmer, richer, and more abundant womanly life. The
magnificent voice is only in keeping with the magnificent proportions of
the singer. A voice which has no grate, no strain, which flows without
effort,--which does not labor eagerly up to a high note, but alights on
it like a bird from above, there carelessly warbling and trilling,--a
voice which then without effort sinks into broad, rich, sombre depths of
soft, heavy chest-tone,--can come only with a physical nature at once
strong, wide, and fine,--from a nature such as the sun of Italy ripens,
as he does her golden grapes, filling it with the new wine of song."

"Well," said I, "so much for our strictures on Miss Letitia's letter.
What comes next?"

"Here is a correspondent who answers the question, 'What shall we do
with her?'--_apropos_ to the case of the distressed young woman which we
considered in our November number."

"And what does he recommend?"

"He tells us that _he_ should advise