witnessed that evening at your house.  But, on inquiry, you learn there is a raw red line ploughed in her flesh by the cruel stays.  ‘What is that?’ you ask, and flatter yourself you have pinned her.  Not a bit.  ’That was the last pair.  I changed them, because they hurt me.’  Driven out of that by proofs of recent laceration, they say, ’If I leave them off I should catch my death of cold,’ which is equivalent to saying there is no flannel in the shops, no common sense nor needles at home.”

He then laid before him some large French plates, showing the organs of the human trunk, and bade him observe in how small a space, and with what skill, the Creator has packed so many large yet delicate organs, so that they should be free and secure from friction, though so close to each other.  He showed him the liver, an organ weighing four pounds, and of large circumference; the lungs, a very large organ, suspended in the chest and impatient of pressure; the heart, the stomach, the spleen, all of them too closely and artfully packed to bear any further compression.

Having thus taken him by the eye, he took him by the mind.

“Is it a small thing for the creature to say to her Creator, ’I can pack all this egg-china better than you can,’ and thereupon to jam all those vital organs close, by a powerful, a very powerful and ingenious machine?  Is it a small thing for that sex, which, for good reasons, the Omniscient has made larger in the waist than the male, to say to her Creator, ’You don’t know your business; women ought to be smaller in the waist than men, and shall be throughout the civilized world’?”

In short, he delivered so many true and pointed things on this trite subject, that the old gentleman was convinced, and begged him to come over that very evening and convince Rosa.

Dr. Staines shook his head dolefully, and all his fire died out of him at having to face the fair.  “Reason will be wasted.  Authority is the only weapon.  My profession and my reading have both taught me that the whole character of her sex undergoes a change the moment a man interferes with their dress.  From Chaucer’s day to our own, neither public satire nor private remonstrance has ever shaken any of their monstrous fashions.  Easy, obliging, pliable, and weaker of will than men in other things, do but touch their dress, however objectionable, and rock is not harder, iron is not more stubborn, than these soft and yielding creatures.  It is no earthly use my coming—­I’ll come.”

He came that very evening, and saw directly she was worse.  “Of course,” said he, sadly, “you have not taken my advice.”

Rosa replied with a toss and an evasion, “I was not worth a prescription!”

“A physician can prescribe without sending his patient to the druggist; and when he does, then it is his words are gold.”

Rosa shook her head with an air of lofty incredulity.

He looked ruefully at Mr. Lusignan and was silent.  Rosa smiled sarcastically; she thought he was at his wit’s end.