TIGHT-LACING. MIGNON says—“DEAR MRS. ENGLISHWOMAN, —I beg—I pray—that you will not close your delightful “Conversazione to the Tight-Lacing question: it is an aborting one; hundreds, thousands of your young lady readers are deeply interested in this matter, and the subscribers to your excellent Magazine are increasing daily, to my own knowledge, by reason of this interesting controversy; pray wait a little, and you will see how the tight-lacers and their gentlemen admirers will rally round the banner that has been unfurled. There is an attempt being made to introduce the hideous fashion of the “Empire”, as it is called. Why should we, who have been disciplined at home and at school, and laced tighter and tighter month after month, until our waists have become ‘small by degrees and beautifully less,’ be expected to hide our figures (which we know are admired) under such atrocious drapery? My stay and dress maker both tell me that it is only the ill-formed and waist less ones that have taken to the fashion; such, of course, are well pleased, and will have no objection to have their waistbands as high as their armpits. Angular and rigid figures have always pretended to sneer at tight-lacers, but any one of them would give half, nay, their whole fortune to attain to such small dimensions as some of your correspondents describe. I shall keep my waist where nature has placed it, and where art had improved it, for my own comfort, and because a certain friend has said that he never could survive if it were any larger or shorter. My waist remains just as it was a year and a-half age, when I left school, where, in the course of three years it was by imperceptible degrees laced from twenty to fifteen inches, not only without injury to health but with great satisfaction and comfort to myself.“