There is near Trenton, says The Newark Advertiser, a woman who is a skillful mechanic. She has made a carriage, and can make a violin or a gun. She is only 35 years old.
This is told as though it were something wonderful for a woman to have mechanical genius; when the fact is, that there are thousands all over the country who would make as good mechanics and handle tools with as much skill and dexterity as men, if they were only allowed to make manifest their ingenuity and inclinations. A girl's hands and head are formed very much like those of a boy, and if put to a trade at the age when boys are usually apprenticed, she will master her business quite as soon as the boy—be the trade what it may.
Sale Of A Wife At Worcester, England.—One of these immoral and illegal transactions was recently completed at Worcester. The agreement between the fellow who sold and the fellow who bought is given in The Worcester Chronicle:
"Thomas Middleton delivered up his wife, Mary Middleton, to Phillip Rostins, and sold her for one shilling and a quart of ale, and parted wholly and solely for life, not trouble one another for life. Witness, Signed Thomas x Middleton. Witness, Mary Middleton, his wife. Witness, Phillip x Rostins. Witness, S. H. Stone, Crown Inn, Friar Street."
Female Inventors.—"Man, having excluded woman from all opportunity of mechanical education, turns and reproaches her with having invented nothing. But one remarkable fact is overlooked. Society limits woman's sphere to the needle, the spindle, and the basket; and tradition reports that she herself invented all three. If she has invented her tools as fast as she has found opportunity to use them, can more be asked?"—T. W. Higginson.
In the ancient Hindoo dramas, wives do not speak the same language with their husbands, but employ the dialect of slaves.
A correspondent of The London Spectator suggests:—"The employment of women as clerks at railway stations would not be an unprecedented innovation; they not unfrequently fill that position abroad; and I can recall at least one instance, when, at a principal station in France, a female clerk displayed under difficult circumstances an amount of zeal and intelligence which showed her to be admirably suited to her office—'the right woman in the right place.'"
The word courage is, in the Spanish and Portuguese languages, a feminine noun.
Upwards of ten thousand females in New York, forty thousand in Paris, and eighty thousand in London, are said, by statisticians, to regularly earn a daily living by immoral practices. And yet all these are Christian cities!
A widow lady of Bury, Mary Chapman, who would appear to have been a warlike dame, making her will in 1649, leaves to one of her sons, among other things, "also my muskett, rest, bandileers, sword, and headpiece, my jacke, a fine paire of sheets, and a hutche."
Addison, in The Spectator, refers to a French author, who mentions that the ladies of the court of France, in his time, thought it ill-breeding and a kind of female pedantry, to pronounce a hard word right, for which reason they took frequent occasion to use hard words, that they might show a politeness in murdering them. The author further adds, that a lady of some quality at court, having accidentally made use of a hard word in a proper place, and pronounced it right, the whole assembly was out of countenance for her.
Sewing In New York.—"I am informed from one source, that based on a calculation some two years ago, the number of those who live by sewing in New York exceeds fifteen thousand. Another, who has good means of information, tells me there are forty thousand earning fifteen shillings ($1.87½) per week, and paying twelve shillings ($1.50) for board, making shirts at four cents."—-E. H. Chapin, "Moral Aspects of City Life."
The first "pilgrim" who stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock is said, by tradition, to have been a young girl, named Mary Chilton.
