GIRLS IN THEIR TEENS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XI, Issue 78, 20 March 1876, Page 4

GIRLS IN THEIR TEENS.

(Saturday Review.) There are, it must be owned, few things on earth of less interest at first sight than a girl in her teene. She is a mere bundle of pale colorless virtues, a little shy, slightly studious, passively obedient, and tamely religious. Her tastes are "simple" — she has no particular preference, that is, for anything ; her aims incline mildly towards a future of balls to come; her rule of life is an hourly reference to " matnms." She is without even the charm of variety, she has been hot-pressed in the most approved finishing establishments, and is turned out the exact double of her sister or her cousin or her friend f with the same stereotyped manner, the same smattering of accomplishments, the same contribution to society of ber little sum of superficial information. We wonder how it is that any one caa take an interest in a creature of this sort just as we wonder how any one can take an interest in the Court Circular. And yet there are few sentiments more pardonable, as there are none more national, than our interest in that marvellous document. A people which chooses to be governed by kings and queens has a right to realise the fact that kings and queens are human beings, that they shoot, drive, take the air like the subjects whom they govern. And if in some coming day we are to toss up our hats and shout ourselves hoarse for a sovereign who is etill in his cradle, it is wise and natural that we should cultivate an interest ia his babyhood, that we should hang on the vicissitudes of his teeth and his measles, that wa should be curious as to the title of his spelling-book, and the exact score of his lust game at

cricket. It is precisely the same interest which attaches us to tbe loosely-tied bundle of virtues and accomplishments which we call a girl. We recoguise in her our future ruler. The shy modest creature who has do thought but a dance, and no will but mamma's, will in a few years be our master, changing our habits, moulding our tastes, bending our character to her own. Io the midst of our drawing room, in our pet easy-chair, we shall see that retiring figure quietly established, with downcast eyes, and hands busy with their crotchet-needles, what Knox called, in days before a higher knowledge had dawned, (< the Monstrous Regimen of Women."