The Bedford Gazette

WOMAN'S RULING IDEA

The Washington States, with a view to show that the possession of style is innate in woman, describes the following scene:

On the last sunny day, passing in the vicinity of a newly erected building, we saw a little beggar girl sitting on a pile of sand. An old scrap of sunbonnet partly shaded her handsome features, and her round shoulders revealed themselves through a rag of a frock, the material of which had been a bright gingham; but its glow had long passed away. She wore no stockings, and the bottom of her dress, which, through the combined influence of time and picking up chips, had become fringed, hardly reached to her knees. Her basket of chips lay on the dirt, by her side, while, with a flushed face and excited effort, she was endeavoring to insert part of an old barrel hoop in the hem of her little petticoat. She worked and toiled: the hem was very ragged, and the hoop very wide, and all full of splinters. At last succeeding in getting so much of it in as to produce the necessary bulge, and, taking her basket, she walked off, swaying her newly-expanded dress from side to side, with at least three feet of the hoop trailing behind. As she swung away there was such an expression of sincere gratification on her face, that, in spite of her ridiculous appearance, we could not help sympathizing with her, and we knew that she was quit as well satisfied as most women are in wearing a mouse-colored moire antique, with point-lace flounces, over a 'patent adjustable bustle expansion skirt'—the latest, and of course the most inflexible, of fashionable guises.— We thought the little beggar girl was not the only one that felt her design apparent, and mad vanity attitude and a sentiment.