the right hand sustaining an open parasol.  Our own waters have, it may be, exhibited spectacles as graceful, though less known to fame.  Never may I forget the bevy of bright maidens who under my pilotage buffeted on many a summer’s day the surges of Cape Ann, learning a wholly new delight in trusting the buoyancy of the kind old ocean and the vigor of their own fair arms.  Ah, my pupils, some of you have since been a prince’s partners in the ball-room; but in those days, among the dancing waves, it was King Neptune who placed on you his crown.

Other out-door habits depend upon the personal tastes of the individual, in certain directions, and are best cultivated by educating these.  If a young girl is born and bred with a love of any branch of natural history or of horticulture, happy is she; for the mere unconscious interest of the pursuit is an added lease of life to her.  It is the same with all branches of Art whose pursuit leads into the open air.  Rosa Bonheur, with her wanderings among mountains and pastures, alternating with the vigorous work of the studio, needed no other appliances for health.  The same advantages come to many, in spite of delinquent mothers, in the bracing habits of household labor, at least where mechanical improvements have not rendered it too easy.  Improved cooking-stoves and Mrs. Cornelius have made the culinary art such a path of roses that it is hardly now included in early training, but deferred till after matrimony.  Yet bread-making in well-ventilated kitchens and sweeping in open-windowed rooms are calisthenics so bracing that one grudges them to the Irish maidens, whose round and comely arms betray so much less need of their tonic influence than the shrunken muscles exhibited so freely by our short-sleeved belles.

Perhaps even well-developed arms are not so essential to female beauty as erectness of figure, a trait on which our low school-desks have made sad havoc.  The only sure panacea for round shoulders in boys appears to be the military drill, and Miss Mitford records that in her youth it was the custom in girls’ schools to apply the same remedy.  Dr. Lewis relies greatly on the carrying of moderate weights upon a padded wooden cap which he has devised for this purpose; and certainly the straightest female figure with which I am acquainted—­aged seventy-four—­is said to have been formed by the youthful habit of pacing the floor for half an hour dally, with a book upon the head, under rigid maternal discipline.  Another traditional method is to insist that the damsel shall sit erect, without leaning against the chair, for a certain number of hours daily; and Sir Walter Scott says that his mother, in her eightieth year, took as much care to avoid giving any support to her back as if she had been still under the stern eye of Mrs. Ogilvie, her early teacher.  Such simple methods may not be enough to check diseased curvatures or inequalities when already formed:  these are best met by Ling’s system of medical gymnastics, or “movement-cure,” as applied by Dr. Lewis, Dr. Taylor, and others.