baby-tending, instead of fluting her little girls' ruffles and
embroidering their garments, she had tried to snatch some information
which would help her in the bringing up of those little girls. The
truth is, mothers take their leisure time for what seems to them to be
first in importance. It is easy to see what they consider essentials,
and what, from them, children are learning to consider essentials. The
"knowingness" of some of our children on subjects connected with dress
is simply appalling. A girl of eight or ten summers will take you in
at a glance, from topmost plume to boot-tap, by items and
collectively, analytically and synthetically. She discourses, in
technical terms, of the fall of your drapery,--the propriety of your
trimmings, and the effect of this, that, or the other. She has a
proper appreciation of what is French in your attire, and a proper
scorn of what is not. She recognizes "real lace" in a twinkle of her
eye, and "all wool" with a touch of her finger-tips. Plainly clad
school-children are often made to suffer keenly by the cutting remarks
of other school-children sumptuously arrayed. A little girl aged six,
returning from a child's party, exclaimed, "O mamma! What do you
think? Bessie had her dress trimmed with lace, and it wasn't real!"

The law, "No child shall walk the street in a plain dress," is just as
practically a law as if it had been enacted by the legal authorities.
Mothers obey its high behests, and dare not rebel against it. Look at
our little girls going to school, each with her tucks and ruffles. Who
"gets time" to do all that sewing? where do they get it, and at what
sacrifices? A goodly number of stitches and moments go to the making
and putting on of even one ruffle on one skirt. Think of all the
stitches and moments necessary for the making and putting of all the
ruffles on all the skirts of the several little girls often belonging
to one family! What a prospect before her has a mother of little