Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE FAMILY GIRLS, WITH A DISQUISITION ON THE AMERICAN' BONNET. " Thou living ray of intellectual fire."—Falconek. S Boston City is the undisputed hub of the universe, so the Boston girl is the unquestioned centre of every female virtue, attraction and accomplishment. This sounds like an axiom, and it is one. The Boston girl shines in the social firmament as Venus in summer skies. Her brilliancy gives a shadow to everything it falls upon. Other stars, even those of first magnitude, wax faint and dim when she sheds her pure white light on mankind. America has much to be thankful for, but for nothing so much as for the Boston girl. The Boston girl is as peculiar to the Hub as is Bunker Hill or Beacon Street. She is the product of an intellectual atmosphere so rare that ordinary girls wilt and wither in it, and become strong-minded female suffragists with corkscrew curls and goloshes. Sheis the brightest and prettiest creature that ever bathed in the sunlight of knowledge. She is a very hummingbird in beauty, a dove in gentleness, an owl in wisdom, A very humming-bird in beauty. and a swallow in physical motion. She is—but let me epecify: All studies, from ecclesiastical history to the theory and practice of the banjo, come within her range. Equally expert at composing a bonnet or a sonnet, she is likewise at ease when discoursing on the morals of the ancient Huns or the domestic habits of the Bosjemans. Biology, Psychology, Sociology come to her as naturally as Huyler's candy and coquetry to other girls. In the giddy whirl of the dance she will look up into your face with a soul-entrancing gaze that is peculiarlyBostonian, and whisper: " What do you regard as the real bases of Schopenhauer's ethics?" You softly convey to her the desired information; ...