“Working Girls” (from Robert Merry’s Museum, October 1863; p. 113)

Happy girls—who can not love them? What cheeks like the rose, bright eyes and elastic step! how carefully they go to work! Our word for it, such girls will make excellent wives. Blessed indeed will men be who secure such prizes. Contrast those who do nothing but sigh all day, and live to follow the fashions; who never earn the bread they eat or the shoes they wear; who are languid and lazy from one week’s end to another. Who but a simpleton and a popinjay would prefer one of the latter, if he were looking for a companion? Give us the working girls. They are worth their weight in gold. You never see them mincing along, or jumping a dozen feet to steer clear of a spider or a fly. They have no affectation—no silly airs about them. When they meet you, they speak without putting on a half dozen airs, or trying to show off to better advantage, and you feel as if you were talking to a human being, and not to a painted or fallen angel.

If girls knew how sadly they miss it, while they endeavor to show off their delicate hands and unsoiled skin, and put on a thousand airs, they would give worlds for the situation of the working ladies, who are above them in intelligence, in honor, in everything, as the heavens are above the earth.

Be wise, then. You have made fools of yourselves through life. Turn over a new leaf, and begin to live and act as human beings—as companions to immortal man.

In no other way can you be happy, and subserve the delights of your existence.