with shoulder-straps, to cure a bad habit of
stooping into which she had fallen; and they
had an inflexible busk in front. But soon she
got accustomed to her corsets, and now is
infinitely grateful to her dear mamma, who gave
her a wasp's waist, paralysed her intercostal
muscles, and murdered Nature.

This experience of corset wearing at night
is not so "unusual" as this miserable martyr
seems to think, writes another fair tight-lacer.
It is the rule in many fashionable West-end
schools. She, the writer of this confession, has
just finished her education at one of these
fashionable West-end schools, where she was
sent when thirteen years of age. Though but
a slender slip of a girl, she was immediately
bound up in a stiff tight-laced pair of stays,
fastened at the back in a cunning knot which
she could not undo, and was made to wear
them night and day. As she was growing at
the time, her stays soon got horribly tight for
her; but from constant pressure the ribs were
not suffered to expand in proportion to the
general growth everywhere else; and
Débutante, as she signs herself, is now happy in the
possession of a structural deformity and certain
vital organs which have been tampered with and
damaged. For, unfortunately Nature did not
provide for wasps' waists when she made the heart
and liver and lungs and stomach and spleen, and
placed those organs within a palisading of ribs
to be protected from injury. She never meant
this defence-work to be crushed in upon them,
and pressed so closely as to leave no room for
healthy action; "superb" though the
sensation of being tightly laced may be. The
thing does not admit of argument. There is
no rational defence possible in favour of such
a senseless practice; though a medical man, or
a mischievous idiot who so signs himself,
comes forward in the same delectable publication,
and declares that "ladies who are content
with a moderate application of the corset may
secure that most elegant female charm, a slender
waist, without fear of injury to health."

Another correspondent—a mother this time—
is "happy" to say that, by a judicious application
of the corset, her eldest daughter has a
waist of eighteen, and her youngest a waist of
seventeen, inches. Another—a wife—married
a man who thought a small waist the greatest
beauty a woman could possess. The young
wife had a waist of the elephantine proportions
of twenty-three inches; but, "determined not
to lose an atom of her husband's affection, for
the sake of a little trouble, and not bearing to
think that he could ever like any one's figure
better than her own, went and got a pair of stays,
made very strong and filled with stiff bone,
measuring only fourteen inches round the
waist."This pleasant kind of corset she put
on with the assistance of her maid, and at
first going off tightened herself into eighteen
inches; and at night slept in her stays, "without
loosing the lace in the least." The next
day she pulled herself in another inch, the
next another, and so on, still wearing her
stays at night, until she had got her waist to
the desired fourteen inches. "For the first
few days the pain was very great," she says;
"but as soon as the stays were laced close,
and I had worn them so for a few days, I began
to care nothing about it, and in a month or so
I quite enjoyed the sensation; and when I
let my husband see me with a dress to fit, I was
amply repaid for my trouble."

We trust that this species of living suttee
will not become common among our young
wives, and that husbands liking waists of only
fourteen inches round, and not objecting to stays
worn through the night to secure that charm,
may be rare phenomena of ignorance and folly.

One young lady, proud of her ugliness, tells
the world in great glee that her waist is only
thirteen inches round! Another, that hers is
twelve; a third, that hers is thirteen, and has been
reduced to that from twenty-three, by the
judicious treatment of a fashionable schoolmistress.
This young lady, giving her own experience,
speaks of a schoolfellow, a girl who was stout
and largely built, and with whom "two strong
maids were obliged to use their utmost force
'to make her waist the size ordered by the lady
principal, viz., seventeen inches, and though
she fainted twice while her stays were being
made to meet, she wore them without causing
injury to her health, and before she left school
she had a waist measuring only fourteen inches,
yet she never suffered a day's illness." The
young ladies in this precious school had a
kind of rivalry among them as to which
could get the smallest waist, and while being
tightened, so that they could scarcely breathe,
they would gasp out to the maid to pull them
in tighter yet, and not let the lace slip, for her
life. But somehow it fell out that most of
these human wasps, though so singularly well
in health, became pale, languid, without much
appetite, and quite the reverse of the joyous,
hearty, rosy, natural creatures, generally
assumed to be the traditional English girl. This
little fact we take to be conclusive—did we
want any other conclusive argument save our
own common sense and the immutable
conditions of the human anatomy—as to the deadly
mischief of tight lacing.

       POLLY'S ONE OFFER

  IN SIX CHAPTERS. CHAPTER V

Polly did not find her position, under these
circumstances, at all unpleasant—rather the
reverse, indeed. There was a great deal going on
at the Grange; never was Maggie so busy in
the kitchen, or so little at leisure to devote
herself to her friend; Laura and Fanny had, of
course, occupations of their own, and were not
going to be troubled with Maggie's darling;
and so it fell out that she was often left to Bob,
who had plenty of idle time on his hands, and
was glad to employ it.

The first morning after her arrival Polly was
introduced to Stella in a large level pasture
field, and Bob having put her in the saddle with
infinite care, and many assurances that she