LADIES' COLUMN.

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 167, 20 April 1871, Page 7

LADIES' COLUMN.

GREAT GIELS.

(From the " Satm day Rcviwo")

Nothing is more ('istinctive among women than the difference of relative age between them. Two women of the same number of years will be. substantially of different epochs of life — the one faded in person, wearied in mind, fossilised in sympathy ; the other fresh, both in face and feeling, with sympathies as broad and keen as they were when she was in her first youth, and perhaps even more so, with a brain still as receptive, temper still as easy to be amused, as ready to love, as quick to learn, as when she emerged from the school-room to the drawingroom. The one you suspect of understating her age by half-a-dozen years or more when she tells you she is not over 40, the other makes you wonder if she has not overstated hers by just as much when she laughingly confesses to the same age. The one is an old woman, who seems as if she never had been young ; the other " just a girl yet " who seems as if she would never grow old ; and nothing is equal between them but the number of days each has lived. This kind of woman, so fresh and active, so intellectually as well as emotionally alive, is never anything but a girl; never loses some of the sweetest characteristics of girlhood. You see her first as a young wife and mother, and you imagine she has left the school-room for about as many months as she has been married years. Her face has none of that untranslatable expression, that looks of robbed bloom, which experience gives ; in her manner is none of the preoccupation so observable in most young mothers, whose attention never seems wholly given to the thing on hand, and whose hearts seems always full of a secret care or an unimparted joy. Brisk and airy, braving all weathers, ready for any amusement, interested in the current questions of history or society, by some wonderful faculty of organising seeming to have all her time to herself as if she had no house cares and no nursery duties, yet these somehow are not neglected, she is the very ideal of a happy girl roving through life a3 through a daisy field, on whom sorrow has not yet laid its hand, aud to whose lot has fallen no Dead Sea apple. And when one hears her name and style for the first time as a matron, and sees her with two or thr.ee sturdy little fellows hanging about her slender neck and calling her mamma, one feels as if mature had somehow made a mistake, and our slim and simple-mannered damsel had only made-believe to have taken up the serious burdens of life, and was nothing but a great girl after all.

No green oasis in the sandy desert," nor momentary gleam of sunshine through a rift in clouds that seem portentous of coming storm and devastation, is more grateful than a happy, cheerful woman; for she is indeed the beautiful spot in what would else be life's desert, and the enlivening bit of sunshine that can make those around her forget the clouds of misfortune and doubt that are ever threatening.

If you were to tell me of any "long, unlovely street," as Tennyson says, in which there are seven hundred and fifty-three married men, I could tell you pretty accurately about the relations of domination that exist between them and their wives. There are six hundred who are entirely managed by their wives; there are one hundred and fifty foolish ones, who are always wrangling and jangling for the mastery; and there are only three who manage their wives without beating them. But then these three are nearly always away from home, being captains of vessels. — " The War and General," by the author of "'Friends in Council," in the " Contemporary Review."

" Madam," said apompous husband, whose wife had stolen up behind him and given him a kiss : " Madam, I consider such an act indecorous !" "Excuse me," retorted the wife, "I didn't know it was you !" /

A natural result of the co-education of the sexes is developed by the t fact that, out of 476 young ladies who have graduated at Oberlin, 172 have married young gentlemen who have graduated from the same institution.

He stood on his head on the wild seashore, and joy was the cause of the act, for he felt as he never had felt before, — insanely glad, in fact. And why? In that vessel that left the bay his mother-in-law had sailed to a tropical country far away, where tigers and snakes prevailed. And more than one of his creditors, too,— those objects of constant dread, — had taken berths in the ship ' Curlew,' whose sails were so blithely spread. Oh now he might look for a quiet life, which he never had known as yet ('tis true that he still possessed a wife and was not quite out of debt). But he watched the vessel, this singular chap, o'er the waves, as she upped and downed ; and he felt exactly like Louis Nap. when " the edifice was crowned" Till over the blue horizon's edge she disappeared from view, then up he leapt on a chalky ledge, aud danced like a • kangaroo! And many :in.l many a joyous lay he pealed o'er the sunset sea; till down with a " fizz " sank the orb of the day, and then he went home to tea,