intervals, forming longer or shorter quadrangles that seem to enclose separate inscriptions. Many of these mouldings are ornamented with a sort of arabesque, while the elaborate characters are strongly suggestive of an important. meaning. Different recent visitors have copied such inscriptions in extenso, but it is to be feared that their labors have been in vain: the key to that picturesque alphabet has been lost forever.

The ghost-ridden natives give the casas a wide berth, but the House of the Dwarf is an object of their especial dread. Mezequenho, the Good Spirit, was never properly worshipped by the citizens of Uxmal, they say; and when the boundary between his patience and his wrath was passed he turned the entire population into stone and confined them in this building. But after sunset the petrified assembly revives, and woe to the wight that passes the Casa del Enano in a moonless night! The north side of the building looks, indeed, as fantastic as any castle in Fairydom a lofty dome, crowned with a tuft of vegetation not unlike a colossal cactus or a gigantic skull with a wisp of hair standing on end and bristling in the breeze, while the shroud of creepers forms a compact mass of foliage from the middle terrace-i.e., from a height of sixty-five feet-to the ground, recalling the legend of Dornröschen's Burg circumvallated with a rampart of wildering roses.

Southwest of the Casa del Enano there are different smaller buildings, too rude and artless or too far advanced in decay to merit a separate description, though I might mention the Casa de la Vieja, the "House of the Old Woman," an ivy-mantled, snug little cottage with a balcony. and a single alcove; and the Casa Cerrada, or "Closed House," a cubic mass of masonry without any opening whatever, a watch-tower, perhaps, or a mausoleum.

Besides these buildings the excavations have brought to light a considerable number of detached statues, terraces, paved court-yards, etc., and some miscellaneous objects whose significance is as problematic as that of the hieroglyphics. There are an amphitheatre and an artificial lake, both excavated from the solid rock; a "tennis-court" or gymnasium, paved, and encircled by a low wall; and a nameless rotunda with fragments of carved columns. On an artificial mound northeast of the Casa Cerrada stands a double-headed sphinx, twelve feet long and five feet high, and a little farther back a six-sided nondescript cut from a single block and with a polished surface about eight feet square. Some American merchants from Sisal had the bad taste to christen it the "Altar of Abraham," and the mayoral, in commemoration of their visit, now calls it the "Altar of Abraham Lincoln," which is certainly worse; but Lincoln is popular in Mexico.

I have already referred to the open-air museum on the river-terrace, where the superintendent has amassed a ship-load of idols and sculptured tablets. He boasts that he has hieroglyphic slabs enough now to roof the largest building in Yucatan; and the excavations which are still progressing will probably increase his collection.

Neither the descent of man nor the purpose of the Pyramids is shrouded in deeper mystery than the origin of these ruins. All we know with certainty is this: that they antedate the advent of Columbus by a period which reaches far beyond the oldest records and traditions of the American aborigines, for that Uxmal was not built by the Aztecs is positively demonstrated by architectural and archæological evidence, and indirectly by the entire absence of local tradition.

CARE OF THE BODY.

M. V. TERHUNE.

["Marion Harland," under which pseudonyme Mrs. Terhune has long been known, is the author of numerous popular novels, of which the first published, "Alone," has been most widely read. Recently she has entered a new field, in her "Common Sense in the Household" and other works on domestic economy, and her "Eve's Daughters," "Our Daughters," etc. Our selection is from "Eve's Daughters," a volume full of sensible and excellently-presented advice to women. Mrs. Terhune (Mary Virginia Hawes) is a native of Virginia, where she was born about 1837.]

THERE is nothing in the history of human folly more egregiously inconsistent than the admixture of vanity and aversion, the loving care and gross neglect, manifested by most young women with regard to their bodies. She whom we saw, awhile ago, disdainfully scouting the prospect of intellectual veneer and varnish, concentrates the attention she bestows upon her physique upon the exterior. The hidden works rust and clog and are worn into uselessness by attrition, disregarded by the owner who should. also be the kindly keeper. It is true, as you remind me, that the body is, at best, but the vehicle of the higher being, the spiritual and mental, the immortal essence that shall outlive by all eternity to come this crumbling house of our pilgrimage, this urn wherein the soul tarries for a night. So the train that bears a living freight of a thousand souls from the eastern to the western ocean is but an ingenious combination of mechanical powers. What is your opinion of the engineer who remits his watch of every joint and bar of the locomotive, who lets his fire go down, or the boiler run dry?

The girl who devotes an hour a day for a fortnight to

learning how to "do" the fantastic scallops of her foretop, or to dispose her back-hair in a graceful coil or knot; who discourses seriously of the absolute necessity of spending at least ten minutes each morning in cleaning, trimming, and polishing, by help of a dainty set of utensils, the finger-nails that in consequence of this attention are like pink sea-shells or curled rose-petals; who studies the effect upon her style and complexion of coiffure, cut, and color as diligently as she cons Xenophon's Anabasis or Spherical Trigonometry, cannot with any show of reason affect contempt of her corporeal substance.

She does love her body-the outside of it-with idolatrous affection that absorbs and dwarfs many worthier emotions. Her neglect of the exquisite machinery it encases is as puerile as it would be to pass hours in burnishing the outside of a watch she never takes the pains to wind up.

If I return once and again upon this branch of our subject, it is because of my conviction that imperfect appreciation of its value is the main cause of the national invalidism of our sex. The climate has to do with it in so far as extremes of heat and cold, long rain, deep snows, and spring mire, hinder out-door exercise. But if mothers and daughters believed in the need of physical culture with one-half the earnestness they feel in the matter of intellectual improvement, these obstacles would lose their formidableness in less than one generation.

I hold firmly, furthermore, to the opinion that the rapid degeneration of women foreigners after a short residence in our country is owing chiefly, if not altogether, to their adoption of certain, and those the least desirable, of our modes of life.

Bridget, whose ideas of in-door comfort have been formed upon the smoky interior of a bog-trotter's cabin

warmed by a handful of peat and lighted by a farthing rush-candle, soon learns, with the prodigality of genuine parvenuism, to fill the range up to the warped, red-hot plate with coal at five dollars a ton. She demands a droplight upon the kitchen gas-burner, and "wouldn't do a hand's turn in a situation where she had to put her foot out o' doors to draw water or to fetch in kindlin'-wood for the fire." Thin boots take the place of the stout brogans in which she used to tramp four or five miles to market or to church in all weathers. Her walks are now confined to a stroll in her best clothes to church on Sunday, and to the house of an "acquaintance" after dark on week-days. She washes in a steaming-hot laundry, and, without exchanging her wet slippers for rubbers, or donning shawl or hood, goes into the windy back-yard, perhaps covered with snow, to hang out the clothes. The climate begins. to tell on her after a year or two of this sort of work, and what wonder? If these violent variations upon her former self and existence are insufficient to break her down, there are not wanting accessories to the unholy deed in her close bedroom, where the windows are never opened in winter unless by her disgusted employer; in the mountainous feather-bed and half-dozen blankets without which she is quick to declare that she "could not get a wink o' slape at night, havin' been used to kapin' warm all her life." Add that she devours meat three times a day with the rapacity of long-repressed carnivorousness and keeps the teapot on the stove from morning until night, that she "could live upon sweets" of the most unwholesome and most expensive varieties, and abhors. early breakfasts,-and we wax charitable toward our maligned climate.

Dr. Beard says of "American women, even of direct German and English descent," "Subject a part of the