calisthenic exercise, and (for the younger members of
the institution) every description of game
adapted to feminine habits, should be practised
by those who attended it. This is a most
important class. The development of bodily
strength having much to do with health in
women as in men. There is no particular harm
either in a woman being able to take a walk with
her husband. It will be a good thing for both,
and such exercise taken together by two persons
who are fond of each other is one of the most
rational and pleasant of amusements.

In the Cookery Class the very desirable
achievement of killing two birds with one stone
is attainable. It is important that in this class
there should be a high development of the
critical faculty contemplated. It will be necessary
that mistakes should be made, in order that
the future matron may be taught to find them
out, and may learn the best means of preventing
them. Let there be, then—since the young
ladies who form this class are not to cook
themselves, but are only to superintend the cookery
of others—let there be a class of girls of inferior
rank admitted here to do the cooking, and
while their mistakes will serve to develop the
critical faculty of the students in this class, they
(the nascent cooks) will gradually learn to
avoid these mistakes more and more themselves,
until they are at last dismissed as perfect. Other
ignorant girls would succeed these, and so we
should not only have our young ladies taught
to be good judges of all matters connected with
the cuisine, but we should have besides, what
is much wanted: a constant issue of trained
cooks.

It is quite certain that the successful action
of this Cookery Class would be materially aided
by there being a dining hall, where the young
ladies should partake of the viands whose
preparation they had superintended, or neglected.
They would then reap the reward of their
vigilance, or the punishment of their indifference,
in the success or failure of the dinner, which,
good or bad, they must eat. It is impossible
that such misfortunes as the appearance of a
soup ornamented with oily circles on its surface,
or a fish which should disclose certain pink
revelations when cut, and whose flesh should
declare a fixed determination to adhere to the
bones,—it is impossible, I say, that such
accidents as these could be of frequent occurrence,
when so hideous a retribution was inseparable
from them.

Intimately connected with the Cookery Class
would be the Household-Bill-auditing Class. It
would come under the duties of its members to
decipher the hieroglyphics of which a butcher's
bill is invariably composed, to test the accuracy
of the weekly accounts by reference to a daily
record of all the articles supplied by each
tradesman, and to examine into the grounds
for the imputation of any item charged. The
pupils should in that case take it by turns, every
week, to provide the dinner and other
necessaries connected with the establishment, and
they would then be enabled with certainty to
judge of the truth or falseness of the accounts
rendered—accounts, let it be remembered, which
should from time to time be purposely sent in
wrong, to elicit the vigilance of the pupil in its
fullest force.

Among the " things not generally known" to
which attention has never been sufficiently
directed must be ranked the enormous influence of
shirt-buttons on home peace; and I consider
that the Shirt-button-Supervision Class is among
the most important of the different branches of
my contemplated Institution. It would require
to be very artfully and dexterously managed.
The pupils should never know when they were
to be called upon to attend this class, and I
would take care that such calls were always made
at the most infelicitous moments. A pupil should
be thoroughly tired out, and should, late in the
day, be encouraged, after passing through a
perfect curriculum of the previous studies, to cast
herself down in an easy-chair cunningly placed
in her way, and should be even encouraged to
solace herself with the most interesting reading
procurable—in other words, a number of
this periodical should be placed in her hands.
At this moment another pupil, supposed to
represent a housemaid, should enter the room, and
should utter the awful words, "If you please,
mum, the things is come home from the wash;
would you please to step up-stairs, and look
them over?" To jump up, to cast down the
interesting reading, and to "step" up-stairs
as requested, would be, with the advanced pupil
of my establishment, the work of a moment:
while with those who are but newly admitted
it would be preceded by much yawning, long
delays, and many other recalcitrant strugglings.
Nor would the secret wiles connected with
the due and proper working of the machinery
of this very important class stop when the
young lady had "stepped" up-stairs. It
would then be necessary that all the
imperfect and defective shirts (contributions of
which should be invited) should be placed in
drawers underneath the linen of a more sound
and unimpaired kind; that the attendant
handmaid should say, "There's no call to look at
them, mum, any ways;" to which the beginner
would probably respond, "Very well, Jane;" while
the more initiated pupil would, on the other hand,
insist on seeing them immediately. There should
be provided every delusion and snare known in
the annals of laundry that can delude the eye
and bewilder the judgment of our young friend.
Button-holes slightly enlarged by long use,
presenting no longer their usual form of a narrow
and constricted slit, but wrought into an abnormal
rotundity of orifice, should be there. Casts
of buttons left in the linen by mangling, the
button itself being absent, should be there; and
there, too, should be the button undecided—most
dangerous deception of all—which, held on by
one, two, or three threads, and stiffened into its
place with starch, feels as if it would do, and
pleads hard to be left alone till next wash. The
pupil who resists this test, and who finds out the
button which is split across the middle without