tutor had sent such laudatory reports of me, that my coming among them had been looked forward to with pleasure; and, as I had seen, a considerable number of the young people of both sexes had assembled to give me a welcome, which had proved so embarrassing to me. But a little practice, he assured me, would soon enable me to feel quite at ease in their society.
I did not explain to him that my confusion was partly occasioned by seeing for the first time some lovely specimens of the opposite sex.
In the well-clad beauties of our northern latitudes, their garments serve more to conceal than to display their shape; their arms are seldom moved from their sides, and the motions of their legs are carefully hidden beneath their flowing robes. But here all this was altered. No tight straps, stiff stays or cumbrous garments interfered with the free action of the limbs and bodies of the fair denizens of this crystal abode.
The graceful movements of their limbs and the lithe suppleness of their bodies gave to them a mode of progression so utterly different from, and so immeasurably superior in elegance to, the mincing gait of our high-heeled and tight-laced damsels at home, that they seemed beings of another and much superior race. Their limbs and bodies were beautifully moulded, exquisitely round and smooth, and their skin looked dazzlingly white in the blue-tinted water. One would have said they were made of flexible marble. The beauty of their feet especially struck me. No shoe or boot had ever compressed the toes or distorted the ankles.
And then the ordinary movements were full of an uncommon grace, that was the very poetry of motion. The body, being of the same specific gravity as the
