danger is the promptness with which remedial measures are adopted, when
they at last become indispensable. In the mean time, we must look for
proofs of the physical resources of woman into foreign and even
into savage lands. When an American mother tells me with pride, as
occasionally happens, that her daughter can walk two miles and back
without great fatigue, the very boast seems a tragedy; but when one
reads that Oberea, queen of the Sandwich Islands, lifted Captain Wallis
over a marsh as easily as if he had been a little child, there is a
slight sense of consolation. Brunhilde, in the "Nibelungen," binds her
offending lover with her girdle and slings him up to the wall. Cymburga,
wife of Duke Ernest of Lithuania, could crack nuts between her fingers,
and drive nails into a wall with her thumb;--whether she ever got her
husband under it is not recorded. Let me preserve from oblivion the
renown of my Lady Butterfield, who, about the year 1700, at Wanstead,
in Essex, (England,) thus advertised:--"This is to give notice to my
honored masters and ladies and loving friends, that my Lady Butterfield
gives a challenge to ride a horse, or leap a horse, or run afoot, or
_hollo_, with any woman in England seven years younger, but not a day
older, because I won't undervalue myself, being now 74 years of age."
Nor should be left unrecorded the high-born Scottish damsel whose
tradition still remains at the Castle of Huntingtower, in Scotland,
where two adjacent pinnacles still mark the Maiden's Leap. She sprang
from battlement to battlement, a distance of nine feet and four inches,
and eloped with her lover. Were a young lady to go through one of our
villages in a series of leaps like that, and were she to require her
lovers to follow in her footsteps, it is to be feared that she would die
single.

Yet the transplanted race which has in two centuries stepped from Delft
Haven to San Francisco has no reason to be ashamed of its physical