This seems a sad result of the wheel-maker’s trade, and one grudges St. Willegis the wheel on his coat-of-arms, if it has thus served to tame down freeborn men and women to the slouching and indolent practice of driving,—­a practice in which the human figure appears at such disadvantage, that one can hardly wonder at Horace Walpole’s coachman, who had laid up a small fortune by driving the maids-of-honor, and left it all to his son upon condition that he never should take a maid-of-honor for his wife.

An exercise to which girls take almost as naturally as to dancing is that of rowing, an accomplishment thoroughly feminine, learned with great facility, and on the whole safer than most other sports.  Yet until within a few years no one thought of it in connection with women, unless with semi-mythical beings, like Ellen Douglas or Grace Darling.  Even now it is chiefly a city accomplishment, and you rarely find at rural or sea-side places a village damsel who has ever handled an oar.  But once having acquired the art, girls will readily fatigue themselves with its practice, unsolicited, careless of tan and freckles.  At Dove Harbor it is far easier at any time to induce the young ladies to row for two hours than to walk in the beautiful wood-paths for fifteen minutes;—­the walking tires them.  No matter; for a special exercise the rowing is the most valuable of the two, and furnishes just what the dancing-school omits.  Unfortunately, the element of water is not quite a universal possession, and no one can train Naiads on dry land.

One of the merits of boating is that it suggests indirectly the attendant accomplishment of swimming, and this is some thing of such priceless importance that no trouble can be too great for its acquisition.  Parents are uneasy until their children are vaccinated, and yet leave them to incur a risk as great and almost as easily averted.  The barbarian mother, who, lowering her baby into the water by her girdle, teaches it to swim ere it can walk, is before us in this duty.  Swimming, moreover, is not one of those arts in which a little learning is a dangerous thing; on the contrary, a little may be as useful in an emergency as a great deal, if it gives those few moments of self-possession amid danger which will commonly keep a person from drowning until assistance comes.  Women are naturally as well fitted for swimming as men, since specific buoyancy is here more than a match for strength; but effort is often needed to secure for them those opportunities of instruction and practice which the unrestrained wanderings of boys secure for them so easily.  For this purpose, swimming-schools for ladies are now established in many places, at home and abroad; and the newspapers have lately chronicled a swimming-match at a girls’ school in Berlin, where thirty-three competitors were entered for the prize,—­and another among titled ladies in Paris, where each fashionable swimmer was allowed the use of the left hand only,