Washington Standard

Captive Maids,

"The mother who is happiest in her girls," says the Chinese maxim, "is she who has only boys." But the well-regulated woman of the Occident rejoices over the birth of daughters, because, as a fine interpreter of maternal emotions lately remarked, "You can dress girls so much more sweetly than boys."

As a mere babe, indeed, the girl has not a perceptible advantage. The same absurdly long skirts and heavy embroideries heat and weary masculine legs as well as feminine. The tender boyish spine is jarred, the winking boyish eyes dazzled, by daily outings in the same sumptuous perambulator, under the same laced and embroidered trappings that pertain to the airings of the girl. But from the age of two years the distinctive superiority of the female infant as an exponent of maternal taste asserts itself. The male of the species gradually degenerates into cloth, linen, and substantial comfort. But his sister can easily be made the rival of her mother in the cost, intricacy, and besetting consciousness of her habiliments.

And since it is the destiny of girls in general to behold in existence an illimitable vista of clothes, the wise and tender mother early inures her offspring to this fate. As the Flathead Indian squaw applies the unyielding board from the beginning, that the baby forehead may retreat at the fashionable angle, so the matron of gentility makes ready her machinery. This includes a costly and perishable bonnet, a velvet coat, with lace adornments or still costlier fur, close-fitting sleeves, embroidered skirts, and a frock which is a mystery of cashmere, lace, and ribbon.

In a word, the tiny maid is on dress parade the livelong day. A fine sense of harmony inspires the mother to make her behavior consonant with her attire. She is not to roll on the floor, nor climb over bedsteads and chair-backs, nor play rough games with the boys. She is not to race and shout, out of doors or in. She is not to play cook with real flour and molding board, nor house-maid with real brush and dust-pan, nor gardener with real spade and sieve, for all these occupations spoil her clothes. When she goes out she is to wear a veil and gloves, with an eye to future exigencies of complexion.

Presently she is old enough to attend dancing-school. Motherly devotion would have her carriage graceful, and her motions set to music. It is an admirable end, to be achieved by the intervention of fresh millinery. The afternoon juvenile class of any fashionable Professor Baps looks like a court ball-room in miniature, and a cheaply dressed child, were such an anachronism possible in a high-toned establishment, would be tacitly left to the bitterness of repentance by her elect comrades.

Throughout her boarding-school days there is no slight limit imposed on the maternal administration of clothes. But from the day when the text-books are finally shut, the daughter in the replication of the mother, "like to double cherry, seems parted," our young girls wear the fabrics and even the jewels of dowagers. Many a debutante of this season has done her first courtesy in a trained gown as costly as her mother's, and as elaborate with fringes, lace, and embroidery. What untried heritage of gauds and splendor is left her to enter upon as a married woman it is impossible to conjecture.

The unthinking are prone to deprecate this manifestation of millinery absurdity and waste. But is it not plain that only women of great force of character and tireless ingenuity could be equal to such a labor?

Nature's hints are so plain that the most commonplace and dull of mothers need not misunderstand them. She makes her babies with a disproportionate head and stomach, to signify that their chief business is to assimilate food--for mind and body. She gives them large and active limbs that are never at rest, that the circulatory processes may be quickened. She bestows lungs, throat, and a voice that demand constant use, that a thousand minute cells may expand and increase. She implants an instinctive thirst for activity, a natural affinity for what we wiseacres are pleased to call dirt and disturbance.

And by inference she insists that the raiment which she is forced to permit us to choose shall as little as possible interfere with her orderly method of disorder. She, too, wise and tender mother of the race, would have graceful children. To that end she insists that they be left unconscious of themselves and their encumberment in the open air, ungloved, unveiled, in easy shoes that leave the little feet free, in loose garments that permit growing tissue its full room.

When the time of study came, Nature would have a strong young body ready to bear the severest strain the mind might put upon it. When the school life was ended, she would present to society a lissome, graceful maid, whose free and simple life had given her such a complexion and such outlines as ask only the slightest aid of dress to reveal their loveliness. And presently she would lead this unspoiled maiden through happy wifehood to blessed motherhood.

It is a fair scheme to look at. The ordinary mind accepts it as good and final. But the great brain and the exalted soul of the merely fashionable mother recognize something better, feel after it, and find it in an apotheosis of clothes.--[Harper's Bazar.

Discipline.

There was a very aged gentleman who in my boyhood visited often at my father's house. He had been a member of Parliament, which, in his young days, implied even more social distinction than it does now. His manners were charming, and he was venerable in character as well as in years. He was very kind to me, and, boy as I was, treated me with never-failing courtesy.

One day, when I fretted a little under the bonds of discipline, he laid his hand upon my shoulder and said: "Let me tell you a story of the great Dr. Parr. You know, of course, who he was; what a power he was in literature, in politics, and in the church. One day I dined in company with him, and he attracted much attention in his wig and his little black silk apron that he wore like a bishop. The conversation turned upon training in schools and colleges; and there was a self-sufficient young man at table who made himself conspicuous by a disagreeable and noisy denunciation of discipline, as something that was calculated to break down a youth of spirit. Parr said nothing for a while, but at last, taking advantage of a pause, he turned to the young man and said, in his lisping way: 'I'm not thurprithed, thir, at your ob-jec-tion to dithipline. Dithipline, thir, waketh the thcolar; dithipline, thir, maketh the gentleman, and the lack of dithipline hath made you, thir--what you are.'" --[Richard Grant White.