AMERICAN LADIES AND THEIR PECULIARITIES.

Colonist, Volume II, Issue 103, 15 October 1858, Page 4

AMERICAN LADIES AND THEIR PECULIARITIES.

The Boston ladies are excessively pretty and fascinating, and rather more enbonppint than their New York rivals, and you often meet with a complexion so transparent as to be quite startling. From the intense cold of the winter, they very seldom leave their houses (which are heated with stoves) for months together; and to this circumstance I imagine a good deal of their delicate, interesting appearance is to be attributed. There is great difference between the Boston and New York ladies. The former: are inclined to be blue—attend anatomical lectures and dissections-—prefer -a new theory of geology or religion to a new fashion ofy, dress or crotchet-wprk7 The >New York ladies, on the contrary, have no tendency to blue-stockingism, and quite dread the character, wishing to be supposed capable of no more serious thought than that involved in the last new polka or the last wedding, and professing that there is nothing worth living for but balls and operas! The fair denizens of both cities,! however, agree to dress in very good taste and style, and make the most of that fleeting beauty which is so fascinating for a time, but which so soon passes away. :They adopt the French fashions completely, but they Americanise them rather too much, sometimes giving them the appearance of[ being overdressed—a mistake a Frenchwoman never makes-—and the habit of wearing short sleeves (or rather no slegves at all j but only a shoulder-strap) at an early dinner at two o'clock, is very unbecoming. Directly a young ; lady leaves school, at fourteen, or fifteen, she "comes out," and is then a responsible agent, giving and accepting invitations to balls, etc., entirely on her own hook; without consulting mamma, who is only employed to find the ready. It is considered quite 'correct for a nice young man to call and take a young lady out for a walk, or to the theatre, or to a ball, without any chaperone. The young ladies marry very young, often at fif-r teen or sixteen, and fade almost before they bloom; at three-and-twenty they look like three-and-thirty, and get very spare. A lady, however handsome, once married, loses her place in society ! very little attention is paid to- her; all is immediately transferred to the unmarried * angels;', however, it is not so much the case as it used to be. One charming old lady pf about sixty told me that I was-the only young man who had honored her with ten minutes' conversation for the last ten years. The society of Boston is quite literary; as one young lady told me afterwards in the West country, 'In Boston we have an aristocracy of soul; in New York they have an aristocracy of money; in England, of blood— which is most worthy of an enlightened country? The same young lady (a smart one, and no mistake) told me that Boston was the only place in the world where ' the feast of reason could be enjoyed in perfection, combined with the proper amount of flow of soul.' In New York and Paris, for instance you can enjoy the flow of soul; in Cambridge or Oxford! the feast of reason (is that all you know of it ? thought I); but Boston is the only true combination of the two.' The young ladies in the north and eastern states have an extraordinary fashion of visiting every corpse within reach. A gentleman I met, who resided at Boston, told me that his father-in-law .had died, and had been laid out, when the next day he was surprised at the arrival of ten or fifteen ladies at the door, and, on asking their business, they said,.' Oh they only wanted to see the body;' and when they had gone many more came. The American ladies are generally possessed with the idea of the great robustness of the English, and imagine, that almost 'every Englishwoman hunts,1 shoots, and plays at skittles, a striking con-j trast to their own fair dames, who are occasionally so die-away and lackadaisical, that they would not walk a hundred yards to pull their husbands or lovers out of the water. A case of the kind really occurred at Boston quite lately, when a lady-like Pelham stood still and screamed for assistance, when, with the slightest exertion, she might have saved her husband a very lengthened immersion.-— Mambles in North and South America.