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over France, and undermined the ancient traditions, cooled off faith, and excited hatred and contempt for things hitherto venerated. Its political theories had overturned governments, unbound Spanish America, and opened its colonies to new customs and new habits of life. The time was coming when the industrious life of American women was to be looked upon disdainfully, and with an evil eye; when French fashions were to prevail, and an anxiety for display in the multiplication and distribution of luxuries were to take possession of the domestic circle, when the dining-hour must be delayed from twelve o'clock to two or even four in the afternoon. Who does not know some of those good old people of the ancient stamp, who live, proud of their opulence, in an unencumbered apartment, furnished with four dusty leather chairs, the floor covered with spent cigars, and the table ornamented solely with an enormous inkstand, whose goose-quills, or perchance, condor-quills, are crystallized with dried ink. This was the general aspect, the family picture of colonial life. It is described in the novels of Scott and Dumas, and living proofs of it are still seen in Spain and in South America, the last of the old peoples who have been called upon to rejuvenate themselves. These ideas of regeneration and personal improvement, this impiety of the eighteenth century, entered, who would believe it, into the heads of my two elder sisters. Scarcely arrived at the age when woman feels that her existence is bound to society, which is the end and object of this existence, they began to aspire to new ideas of beauty, of taste, of comfort, which the atmosphere diffused by the revolution had wafted to them. The walls of the common sitting-room were smoothed and whitened anew; a thing to which no reasonable opposition could be offered, but the mania extended to the destruction of the raised dais that occupied one side of the hall, with