They had cotton jackets, bright red and yellow, mixed in patterns,
confined at the waist by the apron-strings, but bobtailed below the
waist; short woolen petticoats, with broad vertical stripes, red and
white, most vivid in color; white worsted stockings, and neat, though
high-quartered shoes. Under their jackets they wore a thick spotted
cotton handkerchief, about one inch of which was visible round the lower
part of the throat. Of their petticoats, the outer one was kilted, or
gathered up toward the front, and the second, of the same color, hung in
the usual way.

Of these young women, one had an olive complexion, with the red blood
mantling under it, and black hair, and glorious black eyebrows.

The other was fair, with a massive but shapely throat, as white as milk;
glossy brown hair, the loose threads of which glittered like gold, and a
blue eye, which, being contrasted with dark eyebrows and lashes, took the
luminous effect peculiar to that rare beauty.

Their short petticoats revealed a neat ankle, and a leg with a noble
swell; for Nature, when she is in earnest, builds beauty on the ideas of
ancient sculptors and poets, not of modern poetasters, who, with their
airy-like sylphs and their smoke-like verses, fight for want of flesh in
woman and want of fact in poetry as parallel beauties.

_They are,_ my lads.--_Continuez!_

These women had a grand corporeal trait; they had never known a corset!
so they were straight as javelins; they could lift their hands above
their heads!--actually! Their supple persons moved as Nature intended;