Every young woman of the present generation, so soon as she ventures to have a headache or a set of nerves, is immediately confronted by indignant critics with her grandmother.  If the grandmother is living, the fact of her existence is appealed to:  if there is only a departed grandmother to remember, the maiden is confronted with a ghost.  That ghost is endowed with as many excellences as those with which Miss Betsey Trotwood endowed the niece that never had been born; and just as David Copperfield was reproached with the virtues of his unborn sister who “would never have run away,” so that granddaughter with the headache is reproached with the ghostly perfections of her grandmother, who never had a headache—­or, if she had, it is luckily forgotten.  It is necessary to ask, sometimes, what was really the truth about our grandmothers?  Were they such models of bodily perfection as is usually claimed?

If we look at the early colonial days, we are at once met by the fact, that although families were then often larger than is now common, yet this phenomenon was by no means universal, and was balanced by a good many childless homes.  Of this any one can satisfy himself by looking over any family history; and he can also satisfy himself of the fact,—­first pointed out, I believe, by Mrs. Ball,—­that third and fourth marriages were then obviously and unquestionably more common than now.  The inference would seem to be, that there is a little illusion about the health of those days, as there is about the health of savage races.  In both cases, it is not so much that the average health is greater under rude social conditions, as that these conditions kill off the weak, and leave only the strong.  Modern civilized society, on the other hand, preserves the health of many men and women—­and permits them to marry, and become parents—­who under the severities of savage life or of pioneer life would have died, and given way to others.

On this I will not dwell; because these primeval ladies were not strictly our grandmothers, being farther removed.  But of those who were our grandmothers,—­the women of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary epochs,—­we happen to have very definite physiological observations recorded; not very flattering, it is true, but frank and searching.  What these good women are in the imagination of their descendants, we know.  Mrs. Stowe describes them as “the race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls that used to grow up in country places, and made the bright, neat New England kitchens of olden times;” and adds, “This race of women, pride of olden time, is daily lessening; and in their stead come the fragile, easily fatigued, languid girls of a modern age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant of common things.”

What, now, was the testimony of those who saw our grandmothers in the flesh?  As it happens, there were a good many foreigners, generally Frenchmen, who came to visit the new Republic during the presidency of Washington.  Let us take, for instance, the testimony of the two following.