And then the little girls! The idea of hunting under these humbugs of hoops, for little fairy girls, whose antelope motions are thus circumscribed, their graceful limbs hidden, and their gleeful sports checked--the monstrosity of making hideous _their_ perfect proportions, and rendering them a laughing-stock to every jeering boy whom they meet; and--worse than all--the _irreparable moral wrong_ of teaching them that comfort and decency must be sacrificed to Fashion! Bah!--I have no patience to think of it. I turn my pained eyes for relief to the little ragged romps who run round the streets, with one thin garment, swaying artistically to the motion of their unfettered limbs. I rush into the sculptor's studio, and feast my eyes on limbs which have no drapery at all.
Yes, it is trying to feminine ankles and patience, to have gentlemen occupy ladies' places in the "ladies' cabin," and gentlemen who do this will please consider themselves rebuked for it; but it is also disgusting, that women have not fortitude sufficient to discard the universal and absurd custom of wearing hoops. Nay, more, I affirm that any woman who has not faith enough in her Maker's taste and wisdom, to prefer her own bones to a whale's, deserves the fate of Jonah--minus the ejectment.
Yes, I did say that "it is not every man who has a call to be a husband;" and I am not going to back out of it.
Has that man a call to be a husband, who, having wasted his youth in excesses, looks around him at the eleventh hour for a "virtuous young girl" (such men have the effrontery to be _very_ particular on this point), to nurse up his damaged constitution, and perpetuate it in their offspring?
Has that man a call to be a husband, who, believing that the more the immortal within us is developed in this world, the higher we shall rank with heavenly intelligences in the next, yet deprecates for a wife a woman of thought and intellect, lest a marriage with such should peril the seasoning of his favorite pudding, or lest she might presume in any of her opinions to be aught else than his echo?
Has that man a call to be a husband, who, when the rosy maiden he married is transformed by too early an introduction to the cares and trials of maternity, into a feeble, confirmed invalid, turns impatiently from the restless wife's sick-room, to sun himself in the perfidious smile of one whom he would blush to name in that wife's pure ears?