CHAPTER XV.
truth and falsehood.
every schoolgirl now acquires a certain facility at talking French. Mrs. Hartell was educated before this was considered one of the necessaries of polite life, and she set an undue value upon it. She went abroad, to use a commercial phrase, without capital, and consequently returned as poor as she went. In plainer language, she acquired a taste only for that to which art gives a false gloss and fashion a fictitious value, a love for the frivolities that float on the surface of society in the French capital, and for the usages that belong to a highly artificial state of society; usages about as well adapted to our stage in the progress of civilization as an ottoman is to the growing, bounding child, or a lord-mayor's coach to our western hunting-grounds. Instead of training her children to the vigour necessary to endure and resist our
rugged climate, she immured them alternately in the nursery and in a French boarding-school. Instead of allowing their persons to expand in obedience to the laws of nature, the beautiful work of God was marred, and the frames fearfully and wonderfully made were given over to French milliners and tailors. But worse than this: instead of learning to speak their own homely Saxon, in the phrases consecrated by the domestic usages of
