LETTER FROM LASELL.

AUBURNDALE, Feb. 1, 1882. February has appeared in wintry splendor, and from our seat on the hill-top we look out upon our pretty village, up to its knees in snow, in real old-fashioned New England style, and beautiful to behold are the dazzling levels and fantastic drifts under the deep blue sky. But in the busy round of work we have scarcely time to watch nature's doings, and only when she flings a glorious day like this in our very faces do we stop to wonder and admire. Just now we have on the tapis a course of readings from Shakspere, by Prof. R. R. Raymond, the first of which was to have been given this evening, but was postponed on account of Prof. Raymond's illness. He is to read "Julius Caesar," "Henry IV," "Much Ado About Nothing" and "The Winter's Tale." We are particularly anxious to hear his personation of Fallstaff, in which, we have been told, he is at his best, and from what we know of Prof. Raymond and the famous fat knight, we can easily imagine it must be irresistibly droll. Then we are to have a lecture on "Household Art," by Walter Smith, which is to be given next week, and we will not fail to fill many of our winter evenings in some such interesting and pleasant way.

Truly "every shining hour" at Lasell is crowded with something to be seen, or heard, or learned, until one begins to wonder how much of all this rich material one's mind is laying up in store, and how much it treacherously lets slip, since minds are sometimes quite as lazy as their owners. To be sure it's a very deplorable habit, but one which we are obliged to recognize.

Statistics are interesting occasionally, when there are real flesh and blood persons "statisticised," and some of ours have been taken lately, which are not without suggestiveness. In the first place, one hundred and odd girls represent twenty-two States and Territories in our Union, and Canada and Nova Scotia outside. But whether they come from Wyoming or Texas, California or Florida, they are as like as peas when they march to church in procession on Sundays, in their sealskins and great Gainsborough hats with flowing plumes. Dame Fashion has regulated the outer woman, and it must be Mother Nature who has taken care that the nobler part shall not vary too much from the accepted standard for young maidenhood in the nineteenth century, so much alike and so thoroughly "schoolgirlish" are the daughters she has sent us from east and west, from north and from south.

Our average weight is one hundred and twenty-two and one-half pounds, and a pretty fair one it is. Average age, seventeen and one-half, and average gain in three months, whether owing to hard study, or to the much-despised but wise plan of "early to bed and early to rise," seven and one-half pounds. For the benefit of future husbands, who, like good old Dr. Primrose in the "Vicar of Wakefield," choose their wives not for their shining surface, but for good wearing qualities, we will add that seventeen are taking practice lessons in cookery, nine in dress-cutting and three in millinery. For this piece of friendly information we ask nothing but thanks, and some day will describe the doings of the embryo dressmakers and milliners, as the young cooks have been already heard from.