ON FEMININE TASTE IN RURAL AFFAIRS. 53 



thing she touches, and would make a heart beat in a granite rock, 

 if it had not the stubbornness of all " facts before the flood." She 

 is in a dilemma now about the precise uses of lime (which has stag- 

 gered many an old cultivator, by the way), and tells the story of her 

 doubts with an earnest directness and eloquence that one seeks for in 

 vain in the essays of our male chemi co-horticultural correspondents. 

 We are quite sure that there will be a meaning in every fruit and 

 flower which this lady plucks from the garden, of which our fan- 

 friends, who are the disciples of the Sevigne school, have not the 

 feeblest conception. 



There are, also, we fear, those who fancy that there is something 

 rustic, unfeminine and unrefined, about an interest in country out-of- 

 door matters. Would we could present to them a picture which 

 lises in our memory, at this moment, as the finest of all possible de- 

 nials to such a theory. In the midst of the richest agricultural region 

 of the northern States, lives a lady a young, unmarried lady ; 

 mistress of herself ; of some thousands of acres of the finest lands * 

 and a mansion which is almost the ideal of taste and refinement. 

 Very well. Does this lady sit in her drawing-room all day, to re- 

 ceive her visitors ? By no means. You will find her, in the morn- 

 ing, either on horseback or driving a light carriage with a pair of 

 spirited horses. She explores every corner of the estate ; she visits 

 her tenants, examines the crops, projects improvements, directs re- 

 pairs, and is thoroughly mistress of her whole demesne. Her man- 

 sion opens into the most exquisite garden of flowers and fruits, every 

 one of which she knows by heart. And yet this lady, so energetic 

 and spirited in her enjoyment and management in out-of-door matr 

 ters, is, in the drawing-room, the most gentle, the most retiring, the 

 most refined of her sex. 



A word or two more, and upon what ought to be the most im- 

 portant argument of all. EXERCISE, FRESH AIR, HEALTH, are they 

 not almost synonymous ? The exquisite bloom on the cheeks of 

 American girls, fades, in the matron, much sooner here than in Eng- 

 land, not alone because of the softness of the English climate, as 

 many suppose. It is because exercise, so necessary to the mainte- 

 nance of health, is so little a matter of habit and education here, and 

 s) largely insisted upon in England ; and it is because exercise, when 



