English Girls.

Te Aroha News, Volume I, Issue 38, 23 February 1884, Page 3

English Girls.

English girls have a better chance of exercising their muscles now than ever they had before, and the prudent friends of physical education will take care to keep a healthy movement from sliding into the region of fads. Twenty years ago the back-bending pastime of croquet suflieed to the needs of matchmaking mamma? and of their daughters anxious to disport themselves in the open at a minimum expense of bodily exertion. Nowadays young women of the upper and middle classes go in for real exercise. They walk, drive, ride, row and bandy the ball across the net all the line weather long, from dawn to twilight, and some of them nVh and shoot as well. On warm afternoons the upper reaches of the Thames show girl "tours " pulling together in good iorm, and many a young English lady goes straight to hounds and is up w ith the best of the hunt at the iinifh All this is as it should be — a result of domestic enterprise and pluck — and probably no better result would bo effected it the sports of the field formed an item in the curriculum of fashionable finishing schools for the daughters of well -to- do families. Girls ought to exercise their limbs as well as boys, and may easily do so without fuss or unnecessary publicity in J that direction. The Englishman abroad is almost as often as not accompanied by his wife, his sister?, or his daughters, not to mention his "cousins and his aunts," and that those ladies do not hesitate to take plenty of pedestrian exercise is attested by the condition of their shoes and boots standing sentinel outside the bedroom doors of countless Continental hotels. If Mrs Fenwick Miller, who says that there are "many hardships in the lives of women which girls should have strength develope I to encounter," pleads in behalt of the ladies of China or of the United States of America — the latter of whom are credited with using the cars whenever they desire to cross a road — she might have depended upon our sympathy and applause. ]t will seem, however, to the great majority of the public, that her flaccid, bilious, venerated English girls are mere creatures of the imagination. They are not among those to be found during the autumn at the seaside, walking briskly along the sands after the morning dip, with their long hair streaming behind them, like so many ruddy mermaids. — "London Telegraph."