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Show THE GRACE OF ENGLISH GIRLS. Their Wonderfully Flexible Movements Move-ments Are Obtained by the Many Exercises They Practice. BY ELLA VARNAM, Director Physical Culture, London. ' London, June 22. Nobody denies that the French women are the best dressed in the world; nor that Americans are the prettiest women that live, but, while admitting these things, no person will attempt to say that of all the women that walk none approach the English in. positive grace. Take Lily Langtry, big, raw-boned woman as she is; take the wonderfully big women of her company; take the ' leaders of English society, one and all, and note their peculiarities. They may be badly dreBsed, and none of them undoubtedly un-doubtedly are open to criticism in this respect; they may not be pretty, and few of them are even good looking outside out-side their wonderful complexions, but one and all are graceful, graceful as . BXWHN TlElfrHTrd MECt POSITION can be. poems of grace if you will pardon par-don the term! From the time an English girl is 14 her physical culture begins. Just when an American mother is teaching her girl how to walk, and how to be seated, an English woman is telling her daughter how to run and jump. The mother herself is teaching the girl the art of swinging dumb-bells; she is showing her how to balance: is instructing in-structing her in many little entertaining entertain-ing games of rope-pulling and arm-stretching arm-stretching and praising her for what she can do in athletic lines. - Soon the exercises begin to tell. The girl's carriage is more erect? she. holds her chin higher; her arms are more1 adjustable ad-justable to her movements; her feet and limbs move naturally as she walks; she becomes graceful ! I have taken very awkward American Amer-ican girls and given them .grace in a little while, but they were more difficult to teach than the English girls. They received no encouragement at home, and so it was up-hill work for them. Many American mothers seem to think that their girls will suffer some ill from this sort of exercise and are fearful of allowing the tender young bones and soft muscles to take on the work of the gymnasium. They fear lest the delicate mechanism should become disarranged and the girl grow into womanhood with a legacy of ills for which the mother must hold herself responsible. The English mother, on the other hand, holds better than this. Herself a giantess of strength, she is not fearful fear-ful for her daughter. If the girl be 111 she is not compelled to exercise, other- w wise the mother can find ncf excuse for. any slackness in the gymnasium. The' girl is encouraged, coaxed and finally driven to the dumb-bells, the horizontal bar and the ropes; and she must exercise exer-cise whether she would or not. iAnd what is the result? I can answer from professional observation. The English girl grows up so strong that she has no dread of the ills of lifef while the girl who has no such gift of , strength is a prey io all sorts of trou-' bles. Even in the natural functions the English cousin has the better of her weaker cousins, for, by some curioua j natural law, she suffers less. This is either because her nerves are less susceptible sus-ceptible ,or because of the natural de. velopment of the organs that would otherwise remain lifeless and flabby until called upon to perform heroic work. An English girl, with a baby of 10 days, will stroll through the park, seeking seek-ing the sunny corners, there to rest with her baby and enjoy life aAd the green grass after being penned up in the house ten days. A young American mother will struggle out in six weeks, pale and not herself. It lies in the exercise, ex-ercise, in the preparation, in the life that has gone before. 1 took the little daughters of the Princess Prin-cess Beatrice, and their cousins of Albany Al-bany and Connaught, and taught them a set of simple exercises for mornins practice. Each day, directly after rising, they lift their arms high and lower them again; they balance and kneel and throw the arms backward and forward, for-ward, until the lungs are expanded and the limbs supple. Our country cousins, the milkmaids, get their exercise naturally, but the girls of the city suffer from the pent-up air and from the feeling of lassitude which follows bad breathing. I do not advise over three minutes a day for the first three days, then an Increase at the rate of a minute a day until you can exercise for twenty minutes min-utes without stopping. When you have reached the twenty minutes', limit, go back to three minutes a day and work upward until you have reached -twenty minutes again. This gives the muscles time to rest; after that you can exercise exer-cise as much as you please without feeling feel-ing any discomfort. |