The ugly-girl papers
Date: 2025-02-02T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Women -- Health and hygiene; Beauty; Personal

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Title: The ugly-girl papers
or, Hints for the toilet

Author: S. D. Power

Release date: February 2, 2025 [eBook #75279]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1874

Credits: Carla Foust and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UGLY-GIRL PAPERS ***

UGLY-GIRL PAPERS
FROM
HARPERS BAZAR

REPRINTED FROM “HARPER’S BAZAR.”

THE
UGLY-GIRL PAPERS;

OR,

HINTS FOR THE TOILET.

NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,

FRANKLIN SQUARE.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by

Harper & Brothers,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

TO

AUNT SUSAN,

THE DEAR AND HANDSOME OLD LADY WHO NEVER
NEEDED ANY OF THESE RECIPES,

LET ME OFFER MY FIRST BOOK.

S. D. P.

PREFACE.

By means of these scattered chapters the writer has come to know women better—their traditions, desires, and delights. If through these pages women should know themselves and what they may become in regard and temper for their lovers, friends, children, and their own sakes, it will well reward the pleasant labor which has already met such kind appreciation. Begun by chance, to make an agreeable article or two for Harper’s Bazar, the “Ugly-Girl Papers” were continued by request, and have brought the writer into friendly bearings with many of the readers of the Bazar. To their questions and hints these chapters owe more of their value than appears on the surface; and the little book goes out hoping to meet, if not new friends, at least some old ones.

The science of the toilet is well-nigh as delicate as that of medicine; and as no prescription has yet proved a specific for disease, no recipe can reach all cases of complexion. I could wish for this book the good-will and consideration of physicians, under whose advice it may be hoped its suggestions will approve themselves of wide service.

S. D. P.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. |

Woman’s Business to be Beautiful.—How to Acquire a Clear Complexion.—Regimen for Purity of the Blood.—Carbonate of Ammonia and Powdered Charcoal.—Stippled Skins.—Face Masks.—Oily Complexions.—Irritations of the Skin.—Lettuce as a Cosmetic.—Cooling Drinks.—Sun-Baths.—Bread and Molasses

Page 9

CHAPTER II. |

Care of the Hair.—Children’s Hair.—When to Cut it.—Ammonia

Washes.—Glycerine and Ammonia.—Pomades.—How to Brush the Hair.—Cutting the Ends.—German

Method of Treating the Hair.—Southernwood

Pomade.—Hair-Dyes.—Dyeing the Eyebrows and Eyelashes.—Superfluous

Hair.—Depilatories.—Washes for the Eyelashes and Eyebrows

22

CHAPTER III. |

Elegance of Manner.—Grace of the Latin Races.—The

Secret of Grace.—Gliding Movement.—Calisthenics.—Erectness of Figure.—Shoulder Braces.—How to Acquire

Sloping Shoulders.—Care of the Feet.—The Art of Walking.—Picturesque

Carriage of Southern Women

35

CHAPTER IV. |

N. P. Willis as a Critic of Beauty.—The Perfume of the

Presence.—Charm of Good Circulation.—Chills are Incipient

Congestion.—Paper Clothing.—Luxuries of the

Bath.—A Substitute for Sea-Baths.—To Secure Fragrant

Breath.—Delicate Dentifrices.—Fine Cologne.—A

List of Fragrance

48

CHAPTER V. |

Morals of Paint and Powder.—Antique Toilet Arts.—Washington

Ladies.—Making Up the Face.—Whitening the Arms.—Tints of Rouge.—To Make French Rouge.—Milk of Roses.—Greuze Tints.—Coarse Complexions

Caused by Powder.—Color for the Lips.—Crystal and

Gold Hair Powder.—Dyeing Blonde Wigs.—To Darken the Hair.—Champagne and Black-Walnut Bark.—Doom of the Complexion Artist

59

CHAPTER VI. |

Récamier’s Training.—Diana of Poitiers’ Bath.—High

Beauty of Maturity.—The Worth of Beauty.—George

Eliot on Complexions.—Dr. Cazenave.—Barley Paste for the Face.—Prescriptions of the Roman Ladies.—To Remove

Pimples.—Cascarilla Wash.—Varnish for Wrinkles.—Acetic

Acid for Comedones.—To Remove Mask.—Lady

Mary Montagu.—Habit of Italian Ladies.—Wash of

Vitriol

70

CHAPTER VII. |

Shining Pallor.—Lustrous Faces.—Golden Freckles.—Tiger-Lily

Spots.—Sun Photographs.—Nitre Removes

Freckles.—Old English Prescription.—For Yachting.—Almond-Oil.—Buttermilk as a Cosmetic.—Rosemary and

Glycerine.—Lotion for Prickly Heat.—For Musquitoes.—Protecting

Hair from Sea Air.—Fashionable Gray Hair.—Dark

Eyes and Silver Hair.—To Restore Dark Hair.—Bandoline.—Cold

Cream.—Almond Pomade.—For

Skin Diseases.—Sulphurous Acid

77

CHAPTER VIII. |

Service of Beauty.—Not for Vanity, but Perfection.—Eyebrows of Petrarch’s Laura.—Fashionable Baths.—Trimming the Eyelashes.—Luxury of the Toilet.—Its Magnetic

Influence.—A Safe Stimulant.—Amateurs of the Toilet.—Cosmetic

Gloves.—To Refine the Skin of the Shoulders and Arms.—Sulphate of Quinine for the Hair.—For the Eyebrows and Eyelashes.—A Harmless Dye.—To Remove

Sallowness.—A Hint for Stout People.—Perfumed

Bathing-powder

86

CHAPTER IX. |

Hope for Homely People.—Two Vital Charms.—The Way to Live.—Sunrise and Open Air.—Bleached by the Dawn.—Live at Sunny Windows.—In Balconies and Parks.—Christiana’s

Breakfast.—Brown Steak and Good-humor.—True

Bread.—Device for Stiff Shoulders.—Corsets and

Girdles.—The Latter more Needed.—How to be Pleased with One’s Self

95

CHAPTER X. |

The Bonniest Kate in Christendom.—A Word to Mothers and Aunts.—Different Vanities.—The Sorrows of Ugly Women.—Recipes of an Ancient Beauty.—Sand Wash.—Color for the Nails.—Embrocation for the Hands.—Soap to Bleach the Arms.—Freckle Lotions.—Artistic

Enthusiasm at the Toilet

108

CHAPTER XI. |

A Dark Potion.—Olive-oil and Tar for the Face.—Olive-tar for Inhalation.—Carbolic Lotion for Pimples.—Cure for Musquito Bites.—Pale Blondes.—A French Marquise.—Deepening

Colors by Sunlight.—Seductive Cosmetics.—Nose-machine.—Finger

Thimbles

117

CHAPTER XII. |

Removal of Superfluous Hair.—Effects of High Living.—Work of Typhoid Fever.—Roman Tweezers.—Lola Montez’s

Recipes.—Paste of Wood-ashes.—Bleaching Arms with Chloride.—Cautions about Depilatories.—Public

Baths.—Improving Complexions by the Sulphur Vapor-bath.—How

Arabian Women Perfume Themselves.—Profuse

Hair, Sign of Nature’s Bounty

125

CHAPTER XIII. |

Madame Celnart’s Works of the Toilet.—Literature of

Beauty.—Cares of the Toilet.—Arts of Coiffure and

Lacing.—How to Hold a Needle Gracefully.—Iris Powder for Tresses.—Arts of Italian Women.—Depilatory used in Harems.—Spirit of Pyrêtre.—Herbs used by Greek

Women.—Mexican Pomade.—Dusky Perfumed Marbles.—Lost

Perfumes.—Sultanas’ Lotion.—Brilliant Paste for

Neck and Arms.—Baking Enamel

134

CHAPTER XIV. |

The Last of the Rose.—Weighing in the Balances.—To

Love and to be Loved.—The Enigma of Love.—Its Power over the Lot of Men.—Inspiration in the Looks.—The

Land of Spring.—The Duchess of Devonshire.—Women at and after Thirty.—Training of Emotion.—Warming the Voice.—Crow’s-feet at the Opera.—Bohemian Arsenic

Waters.—Recipe from Madame Vestris.—Milk of Roses.—Sweet-oils.—Opera-dancers’

Prescription for Restoring

Suppleness

146

CHAPTER XV. |

The Fearful Malady of which no one Dies.—Esprit Odontalgique.—Gray

Pastilles.—Important to Smokers.—Mouth

Perfumes.—Care of the Breath.—Directions for

Bathing.—Perfumes for the Bath.—Bazin’s Pâte.—Quality of Soaps.—Bathing and Anointing the Feet.—Nicety of Stockings.—Delicate Shoe Linings.—Feet of Pauline

Bonaparte

155

CHAPTER XVI. |

“The Leaves are Full of Joy.”—Nobility of the Body.—Its

Possibilities.—Brain and Heart Dependent on it.—Physical

Culture Imperative in America.—Our Contempt of Health.—Easier to be Magnificent than Clean.—Distilled

Water for Every Use.—Substitute for Stills.—Vapor and Sulphur Baths.—Bran Baths.—Oatmeal for the

Hands.—Frequency of Baths.—Remedies for Hepatic

Spots

165

CHAPTER XVII. |

The Banting System.—A Quaint Author.—Trials of Corpulency.—Result of Living on Sixpence a Day.—Indifference of Doctors.—A Wise Surgeon.—Relation of Glucose to

Obesity.—Diet for Stout People.—No Starch, no Sugar.—Losing

Flesh at the Rate of a Pound a Week.—“Human

Beans.”—Humors of Banting’s Tract.—His Gratitude.—Honors to Dr. Harvey.—One Day with Dives, the Next with Lazarus.—Bromide of Ammonia

175

CHAPTER XVIII. |

A Letter.—Trials of a Plain Woman.—The Best Husband in the World.—Burdock Wash for the Hair.—For Children’s

Hair.—Oil of Mace as a Stimulant.—To Restore

Color to the Hair.—Sperm-oil a Powerful Hair Restorer.—The

Cheapest Hair-Dye.—Cure for Chilblains.—Loose

Shoes the Cause of Corns.—Pyroligneous Acid for Corns.—Turpentine and Carbolic Acid for Soft Corns

185

CHAPTER XIX. |

A Talk about Complexions.—Delicate Lotion.—Cause of

Rough Faces.—Sun Painting and Bleaching.—Court

Ladies Refusing to Wash their Faces.—Experiments with Olive-tar.—Consumption and Clear Faces.—Rev.

W. H. H. Murray on Olive-tar.—Porcelain Women.—Drawing

Humors to the Surface.—What is to be Done for the Weak Women?

192

CHAPTER XX. |

Sulphur Baths.—Bleaching Old Faces.—Experiments in

Bathing.—Cautions.—Need of Public Baths.—Their

Proper Prices.—Method of Giving Sulphur Vapor-baths.—Hot

Baths for Hot Weather.—Russian Baths at Home.—Improvements

Needed in Public Baths.—What they

Should be.—What they Are.—The Russian Vapor-bath.—After-Sensations.—Brightness and Lightness of

Health.—Reverence for the Physical.—Influence of

Bathing on the Nerves and Passions.—Necessity of

Public Baths

198

CHAPTER XXI. |

Devices of Uneasy Age.—Bread Paste and Court-plaster to Conceal Wrinkles.—Accepting the Situation.—Plain

Women and Agreeable Toilets.—Examples.—The Rector’s

Daughter.—Dressing on Two Hundred a Year.—Écru

Linen and White Nansook.—A Senator’s Wife.—A

Washington Success.—Dull, Thin Faces.—Hay-colored

Hair.—Advantages of Lining Rooms with Mirrors

212

CHAPTER XXII. |

Physical Education of Girls.—A Woman’s Value in the

World.—High-bred Figures.—Antique Races.—Inspiration of Art not Vanity.—The Trying Age.—Dress,

Food, and Bathing for Young Girls.—A Veto on Close

Study.—Braces and Backboards.—Never Talk of Girls’

Feelings.—Exercise for the Arms.—Singing Scales with

Corsets off.—Development of the Bust.—Open-work Corsets the Best.—The Bayaderes of India and their Forms.—The

Delicacy due Young Girls.—A Frank but Needed

Caution.—Care of the Figure after Nursing

224

CHAPTER XXIII. |

Hands and Complexions.—Preparing for Parties.—Refining

Rough Faces.—Carbolic Baths.—Chalk and Cascarilla.—Glycerine

Wash.—School-girls’ Flushed Hands and

Faces.—To Soften the Hands.—Red Noses.—Secrets of

Making-up.—Cologne for the Eyes.—Cosmetic Gloves.—To

Impart a Brilliant Complexion

238

CHAPTER XXIV. |

Women’s Looks and Nerves.—A Low-toned Generation.—Children and their Ways.—Brief Madness.—Women in the Woods.—Singing.—Work well done the Easiest.—Sleep the Remedy for Temper.—Hours for Sleep.—The

Great Medicines—Sunshine, Music, Work, and Sleep

247

CHAPTER XXV. |

Changing Wigs and Chignons.—Matching Braids.—Frizzing the Hair.—Crimping-pins.—Blonde Hair-pins.—What

Colors Hair.—Bleaching Tresses.—Sulphur Paste.—Foxy

Locks.—Freshening Switches

257

CHAPTER XXVI. |

Hair and Complexion.—Black Dyes.—Persian Blue-Black.—Peroxide of Hydrogen.—Chloride of Gold.—Transient

Dyes

267

THE UGLY-GIRL PAPERS.

CHAPTER I.

Woman’s Business to be Beautiful.—How to Acquire a Clear Complexion.—Regimen for Purity of the Blood.—Carbonate of Ammonia and Powdered Charcoal.—Stippled Skins.—Face Masks.—Oily Complexions.—Irritations of the Skin.—Lettuce as a Cosmetic.—Cooling Drinks.—Sun-Baths.—Bread and Molasses.

The first requisite in a woman toward pleasing others is that she should be pleased with herself. In no other way can she attain that self-poise, that satisfaction, which leaves her at liberty to devote herself successfully to others.

I appeal to the ugly sisterhood to know if this is not so. Could a woman be made to believe herself beautiful, it would go far toward making her so. Those hopeless, shrinking souls, alive with devotion and imagination, with hearts as fit to make passionate and worshiped lovers, or steadfast and inspiring heroines, as the fairest Venus of the sex, need not for an instant believe there is no alleviation for their case, no chance of making face and figure more attractive and truer exponents of the spirit within.

There is scarcely any thing in the history of women more touching than the homage paid to beauty by those who have it not. No slave among her throng of adorers appreciated more keenly the beauty of Récamier than the skeleton-like, irritable Madame De Chateaubriand. The loveliness of a rival eats into a girl’s heart like corrosion; every fair curling hair, every grace of outline, is traced in lines of fire on the mind of the plainer one, and reproduced with microscopic fidelity. It is a woman’s business to be beautiful. She recommends every virtue and heroism by the grace which sets them forth. Women of genius are the first to lay the crown of womanhood on the head of the most beautiful. Mere fashion of face and form are not meant by beauty, but that symmetry and brightness which come of physical and spiritual refinement. Such are the heroines of Scott, Disraeli, and Bulwer, as inspiring as they are rare. Toward such ideals all women yearn.

Who will say that this most natural feeling of the feminine heart may not have some fulfillment in the first thirty years of life? This limit is given because the latest authorities in social science assert that woman’s prime of youth is twenty-six, moving the barriers a good ten years ahead from the old standard of the novelist, whose heroines are always in the dew of sixteen. In the very first place, one may boldly say that beauty, or rather fascination, is not a matter of youth, and no woman ought to sigh over her years till she feels the frost creeping into her heart. Men of the world understand well that a woman’s wit is finest, and her heart yields the richest wealth, when experience has formed the fair and colorless material of youth. A sweet girl of seventeen and a high-bred beauty of thirty, if well preserved, may dispute the palm. I do not mean to decry rose-buds and dew. One hardly knows which to love them for most—their loveliness or their briefness. But women who look their thirties in the face should not lay down the sceptre of life, or fancy that its delights for them are over. They are young while they seem young.

Then we may boldly set about renovating the outward form, sure that Nature will respond to our efforts. The essence of beauty is health; but all apparently healthy people are not fair. The type of the system must be considered in treatment. The brunette is usually built up of much iron, and the bilious secretion is sluggish. The blonde is apt to be dyspeptic, and subject to disturbances of the blood. From these causes result freckles, pimples, and that coarse, indented skin stippled with punctures, like the tissue of pig-skin—a fault of many otherwise clear complexions.

The fairest skins belong to people in the earliest stage of consumption, or those of a scrofulous nature. This miraculous clearness and brilliance is due to the constant purgation which wastes the consumptive, or to the issue which relieves the system of impurities by one outlet. We must secure purity of the blood by less exhaustive methods. The diet should be regulated according to the habit of the person. If stout, she should eat as little as will satisfy her appetite; never allowing herself, however, to rise from the table hungry. A few days’ resolute denial will show how much really is needed to keep up the strength. When recovering from severe nervous prostration, years ago, the writer found her appetite gone. The least morsel satisfied hunger, and more produced a repugnance she never tried to overcome. She resumed study six hours a day and walked two miles every day from the suburbs to the centre of the city, and back again. Breakfast usually was a small saucer of strawberries and one Graham cracker, and was not infrequently dispensed with altogether. Lunch was half an orange—for the burden of eating the other half was not to be thought of; and at six o’clock a handful of cherries formed a plentiful dinner. Once a week she did crave something like beef-steak or soup, and took it. But, guiding herself wholly by appetite, she found with surprise that her strength remained steady, her nerves grew calm, and her ability to study was never better. This is no rule for any one, farther than to say persons of well-developed physique need not fear any limitation of diet for a time which does not tell on the strength and is approved by appetite. Never eat too much; never go hungry.

For weak digestion nothing is so relished or strengthens so much as the rich beef tea, or rather gravy, prepared from the beef-jelly sold by first-rate grocers. This is very different from the extracts of beef made by chemists. The condensed beef prepared by the same companies which send out the condensed milk is preferable, in all respects, as to taste and nourishment. A table-spoonful of this jelly, dissolved by pouring a cup of boiling water on it, and drank when cool, will give as much strength as three fourths of a pound of beef-steak broiled. For singers and students, who need a light but strengthening diet, nothing is so admirable.

Nervous people, and sanguine ones, should adopt a diet of eggs, fish, soups, and salads, with fruit. This cools the blood, and leaves the strength to supply the nerves instead of taxing them to digest heavy preparations. Lymphatic people should especially prefer such lively salads as cress, pepper-grass, horseradish, and mustard. These are nature’s correctives, and should appear on the table from March to November, to be eaten not merely as relishes, but as stimulating and beneficial food. They stir the blood, and clear the eye and brain from the humors of spring. Nervous people should be more sparing of these fiery delights, and eat abundantly of golden lettuce, which contains opium in its most delicate and least injurious state. The question of fat meat does not seem satisfactorily settled. I should compound by using rich soups which contain the essence of meats, and supply carbon by salad-oil and a free use of nuts or cream. Plump, fair people may let oily matters of all kinds carefully alone. Thin ones should eat vegetables—if they can find a cook who knows how to make them palatable. It is strange that in this country, which produces the finest vegetables, fit for the envy of foreign cooks, not one out of a hundred knows how to prepare them properly. People who are anxious to be rid of flesh should choose acids, lemons, limes, and tamarinds, eat sparingly of dry meats, with crackers instead of bread, and follow strictly the advice now given.

To clear the complexion or reduce the size, the blood must be carefully cleansed. Two simple chemicals should appear on every toilet-table—the carbonate of ammonia and powdered charcoal. No cosmetic has more frequent uses than these. The ammonia must be kept in glass, with a glass stopper, from the air. French charcoal is preferred by physicians, as it is more finely ground, and a large bottle of it should be kept on hand. In cases of debility and all wasting disorders it is valuable. To clear the complexion, take a teaspoonful of charcoal well mixed in water or honey for three nights, then use a simple purgative to remove it from the system. It acts like calomel, with no bad effects, purifying the blood more effectually than any thing else. But some simple aperient must not be omitted, or the charcoal will remain in the system, a mass of festering poison, with all the impurities it absorbs. After this course of purification, tonics may be used. Many people seem not to know that protoxide of iron, medicated wine, and “bracing” medicines are useless when the impurities remain in the blood. The use of charcoal is daily better understood by our best physicians, and it is powerful, and simple enough to be handled by every household. The purifying process, unless the health is unusually good, must be repeated every three months. We absorb in bad food and air more unprofitable matter than nature can throw off in that time. If diet and atmosphere were perfect, no such aid would be needed; but it is the choice between a very great and a small evil in existing conditions. A free use of tomatoes and figs is, by the way, recommended, to maintain a healthy condition of the stomach, and the seeds of either should not be discarded.

The most troublesome task is to refine a stippled skin whose oil-glands are large and coarse. There may not be a pimple or freckle on the face, and the temples may be smooth, but the nose and cheeks look like a pin-cushion from which the pins have just been drawn. Patience and many applications are necessary, for one must, in fact, renew the skin.

The worst face may be softened by wearing a mask of quilted cotton wet in cold water at night. Roman ladies used poultices of bread and asses’ milk for the same purpose; but water, and especially distilled water, is all that is needful. A small dose of taraxacum every other night will assist in refining the skin. But it will be at least a six weeks’ work to effect the desired change; and it will be a zealous girl who submits to the discomfort of the mask for that length of time. The result pays. The compress acts like a mild but imperceptible blister, and leaves a new skin, soft as an infant’s. Bathing oily skins with camphor dries the oil somewhat, when the camphor would parch nice complexions. The opium found in the stalks of flowering lettuce refines the skin singularly, and may be used clear, instead of the soap which sells so high. Rub the milky juice collected from broken stems of coarse garden lettuce over the face at night, and wash with a solution of ammonia in the morning.

Blondes who are unbeautiful are apt to have divers irritations of the skin, which their darker neighbors do not know. People of this type also have a tendency to acid stomachs, the antidote for which is a dose of ammonia, say one quarter of a spoonful in half a glass of water, taken every night and morning. This also prevents decay of the teeth and sweetens the breath, and is less injurious than the soda and magnesia many ladies use for acid stomachs. In summer the system should be kept cool by bathing at night and morning, and by tart drinks containing cream of tartar. Small quantities of nitre, prescribed by the physician, may be taken by very sanguine persons who suffer with heat; but pale complexions should seek the sun when its power is not too great, and be careful, of all things, to avoid a chill. This deadens the skin, paints blue circles round the eyes, and leaves the hands an uncertain color.

These precautions may seem burdensome, but they all have been practiced by those who prize beauty. Nothing is so attractive, so suggestive of purity of mind and excellence of body, as a clear, fine-grained skin. Strong color is not desirable. Tints, rather than colors, best please the refined eye in the complexion. Some mothers are so anxious to secure this grace for their daughters that they are kept on the strictest diet from childhood. The most dazzling Parian could not be more beautiful than the cheek of a child I once saw who was kept on oatmeal porridge for this effect. At a boarding-school, I remember, a fashionable mother gave strict injunctions that her daughter should touch nothing but brown bread and syrup. This was hard fare; but the carmine lips and magnolia brow of the young lady were the envy of her schoolmates, who, however, were not courageous enough to attempt such a régime for themselves.

CHAPTER II.

Care of the Hair.—Children’s Hair.—When to Cut it.—Ammonia Washes.—Glycerine and Ammonia.—Pomades.—How to Brush the Hair.—Cutting the Ends.—German Method of Treating the Hair.—Southernwood Pomade.—Hair-Dyes.—Dyeing the Eyebrows and Eyelashes.—Superfluous Hair.—Depilatories.—Washes for the Eyelashes and Eyebrows.

St. Paul approved himself no less a connoisseur of female beauty than a censor of decorum when he wrote, “If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her.” This is in no wise inconsistent with the other apostolic passage which discourages ornate hair-dressing, for abundant shining hair needs less care to arrange than a scanty crop that must be disposed to the best advantage. The woman whose magnificent chevelure reaches to her waist, thick as one’s wrist when tightly bound, needs no braid nor cataract, finger-puff nor snow-curl, nor band of gold or amber to crown herself. Every girl ought to have such hair. Mothers should remember that such gifts of nature form a dowry which has no little weight in the incidents of a woman’s life, and should cultivate assiduously the locks of their daughters. It is not best to keep them closely cut: after five years they should never be touched by scissors, save to clip the ends once a month, as hereafter explained, but should be smoothly braided in long Marguerite plaits, the most convenient style, unless the mother is ambitious of seeing her pet’s hair in curls. Hardly any locks will resist good discipline, if taken in the downy stage of infancy and submitted to papillotes. It is a mistaken notion that a luxuriant growth of hair in childhood weakens the head. Nature is not in the habit of providing superfluities. The Breton women are noted for their magnificent hair, which is allowed to grow from childhood. The barbarity of the fine comb should be abolished in civilized nurseries, and a daily or semi-weekly wash with ammonia or soap substituted, with a thorough brushing afterward. A child’s head is too tender for any rasping process; even knotted snarls should be cut rather than pulled out. Send tow-headed children into the sun as much as possible, that its rays may affect every particle of the iron in the blood, and change the flaxen colors to more agreeable shades.

When the hair has been neglected, cut it to an even length, and wash the scalp nightly with soft water into which ammonia has been poured. This may be as strong as possible at first, so that it does not burn the skin. Afterward the proportions may be three large spoonfuls of ammonia to a basin of water. Apply with a brush, stirring the hair well while the head is partially immersed. Do this at night, so that it may have a chance to dry, for nothing is so disagreeable as hair put up wet and turned musty. Wring and wipe it thoroughly, then comb and shake out the tresses in a draft of air till nearly dry, when it may be done up in a cotton net. Night-caps heat the head and injure hair. Ammonia is the most healthful and efficient stimulus known for the hair, and quickens its growth when nothing else will do so. A healthy system will supply oil enough for the hair if the head is kept clean. If the scalp is unnaturally dry, a mixture of half an ounce of carbonate of ammonia in a pint of sweet-oil makes the most esteemed hair invigorator. Glycerine and ammonia make a delicate dressing for the hair, and will not soil the nicest bonnet. Pomades of all kinds are voted vulgar, and justly. The only excuse for their use is just before entering a sea bath, when a thorough oiling of the hair prevents injury from salt water. It should be speedily washed off with a dilution of ammonia.

When a growth of young hair is established, it ought to lengthen at least eight inches a year in a vigorous subject. Hair is an index of vitality. The women of the tropics, with their abounding health, have luxuriant chevelures. Among Spanish and South American women hair a yard long, in a coil as thick as the wrist, is the rule, and not the exception. The warmth of those latitudes favors the secretions, and stimulates every organ to its fullest development. To obtain like results, we must try to obtain the same conditions of luxuriant health. A good circulation is essential to fineness and pleasing color of the hair. The scalp must be stimulated by frequent brushing, as well as by the ammonia bath. A lady of fashion decreed one hundred strokes of the brush to be given her celebrated locks daily, and those who have tried the experiment find that it is not at all too much. Given quickly, this number occupies three minutes in bestowing, and surely this is little enough time to give a fine head of hair. Once a month the ends of the hair should be cut, to remove the forked ends, which stop its growth. The patrons of a certain New York school of high repute will remember the young daughter of an Albany gentleman, whose wonderful hair was the pride of the establishment. The child was about ten years old, and her heavy tresses reached literally to the floor. She was not unfrequently shown to visitors as a phenomenon, veiled in this flood of hair. On inquiry, it was found that no peculiar treatment was given it beyond cutting the ends regularly every month for years.

An old authority gives the following as the German method of treating the hair. The women of that country are known to have remarkably luxuriant locks: Once in two weeks wash the head with a quart of soft water in which a handful of bran has been boiled and a little white soap dissolved. Next rub the yolk of an egg slightly beaten into the roots of the hair; let it remain a few minutes, and wash it off thoroughly with pure water, rinsing the head well. Wipe and rub the hair dry with a towel, and comb it up from the head, parting it with the fingers. In winter do all this near the fire. Have ready some soft pomatum of beef marrow, boiled with a little almond or olive-oil, flavored with mild perfume. Rub a small quantity of this on the skin of the head after it has been washed as above. This may be efficient, but in this age women prefer the cleanlier method of stimulating the hair without pomade.

If any ladies are as fond of stirring up cosmetics and washes as were the wife and daughters of the Vicar of Wakefield, they may try these highly recommended recipes:

The following is said to be an excellent curling fluid: Put two pounds of common soap cut small into three pints of spirits of wine, and melt together, stirring with a clean piece of wood; add essence of ambergris, citron, and neroli, about a quarter of an ounce of each.

Rowland’s Macassar Oil for the hair: Take a quarter of an ounce of the clippings of alkanet root, tie this in a bit of coarse muslin, and suspend it in a jar containing eight ounces of sweet-oil for a week, covering from the dust. Add to this sixty drops of the tincture of cantharides, ten drops of oil of rose, neroli and lemon each sixty drops. Let these stand three weeks closely corked, and you will have one of the most powerful stimulants for the growth of the hair ever known.

Take a pound and a half of southernwood and boil it, slightly bruised, in a quart of old olive-oil, with half a pint of port-wine or spirit. When thoroughly boiled, strain the oil carefully through a linen cloth. Repeat the operation three times with fresh southernwood, and add two ounces of bear’s grease or fresh lard. Apply twice a week to the hair, and brush it in well.

Where a hair-dye is deemed essential, the deplorable want may be met by this recipe, which has the merit of being less harmful than most of the nostrums in use: Boil equal parts of vinegar, lemon juice, and powdered litharge for half an hour, over a slow fire, in a porcelain-lined vessel. Wet the hair with this decoction, and in a short time it will turn black.

Lola Montez gives a hair-dye which is said to be instantaneous, and as harmless as any mineral dye used. It is made from gallic acid, ten grains; acetic acid, one ounce; tincture of sesquichloride of iron, one ounce. Dissolve the gallic acid in the sesquichloride, and add the acetic acid. Wash the hair with soap and water, and apply the dye by dipping a fine comb in it and drawing through the hair so as to color the roots thoroughly. Let it dry; oil and brush.

White lashes and eyebrows are so disagreeably suggestive that one can not blame their possessor for disguising them by a harmless device. A decoction of walnut-juice should be made in the season, and kept in a bottle for use the year round. It is to be applied with a small hair-pencil to the brows and lashes, turning them to a rich brown, which harmonizes with fair hair. It may be applied to the edge of the hair about the face and neck, when that is paler than the rest. Let me repeat that the best remedy for ill-used tresses is strict care; glossy, vitalized tresses, kept in order by constant brushing, assume by degrees a better color. It is a mistake to soak red hair with oil in the hope of making it darker; it should be kept wavy and light as possible, to show off the rich lights and shadows with which it abounds. The sun has a good effect on obnoxious shades of hair if it is otherwise well attended to, and red or white locks should be worn in floating masses, waved by fine plaiting at night, or by crimping-pins, which do not injure hair unless worn too tight. Pale hair shows a want of iron in the system, and this is to be supplied by a free use of beef-steaks, soups, pure beef gravies, and red wines. Salt-water bathing strengthens the system, and acts favorably on the hair. As to color, hardly any shade is unlovely when luxuriant and in a lively condition. It is only when diseased or uncared for that any color appears disagreeable. Sandy hair, when well brushed and kept glossy with the natural oil of the scalp, changes to a warm golden tinge. I have seen a most obnoxious head of this color so changed by a few years’ care that it became the admiration of the owner’s friends, and could hardly be recognized as the withered, fiery locks once worn.

Superfluous hair is as troublesome to those who have it as baldness is to others. There is no way to remove it but by dilute acids or caustics, patiently applied time after time, as the hair makes its appearance. The mildest depilatories known are parsley water, acacia-juice, and the gum of ivy. It is said that nut-oil will prevent the hair from growing. The juice of the milk-thistle, mixed with oil, according to medical authority, prevents the hair from growing too low on the forehead, or straggling on the nape of the neck. As Willis says, Nature often slights this part of her masterpiece. Muriatic acid, very slightly reduced, applied with a sable pencil, will destroy the hair; and, to prevent its growing, the part may be often bathed with strong camphor or clear ammonia. The latter will serve as a depilatory, but causes great pain, and must be quickly washed off. The depilatories sold in the shops are strong caustics, and leave the skin very hard and unpleasant. Bathe the upper lip, or other feature afflicted with superfluous hair, with ammonia or camphor, as strong as can be borne, and the hair will die out in a few weeks. Moles, with long hairs in them, should be touched with lunar caustic repeatedly. A large, dark mole on a lady’s neck was reduced to an unnoticeable white spot, but the nitrate of silver caused a sore for a week in place of the mole. Care should be taken to brush the back hair upward from childhood, to prevent the disfiguring growth of weak, loose hairs on the neck. Fine clean wood-ashes, mixed with a little water to form a paste, makes a tolerable depilatory for weak hair, without any pain. Strong pearlash washes also kill out poor hair.

A clever scientific man suggested that the growth of hair might be hastened by frequently applying electric currents to it, or bathing it in electrical water. Similar experiments have been made on vital tissues with remarkable success. But this theory must be left for further development.

The eyelashes may be improved by delicately cutting off their forked and gossamer points, and anointing with a salve of two drachms of ointment of nitric oxide of mercury and one drachm of lard. Mix the lard and ointment well, and anoint the edges of the eyelids night and morning, washing after each time with warm milk and water. This, it is said, will restore the lashes when lost by disease. The effect of black lashes is to deepen the color of gray eyes. They may be darkened for theatricals by taking the black of frankincense, resin, and mastic burned together. This will not come off with perspiration.

CHAPTER III.

Elegance of Manner.—Grace of the Latin Races.—The Secret of Grace.—Gliding Movement.—Calisthenics.—Erectness of Figure.—Shoulder Braces.—How to acquire Sloping Shoulders.—Care of the Feet.—The Art of Walking.—Picturesque Carriage of Southern Women.

Was it not Madame de Genlis who described the education in manners under the old régime of France? In her memoirs she speaks of hating Paris, when she came from the provinces, for the ordeal she underwent there to fit her for polite society. She was taught, what she fancied she knew already, how to walk, and was placed in the stocks two or three hours a day to teach her the right position of her feet in standing. A corset and back-board were provided to form an erect habit. Whether in her day or later ones, the elegancies of manner are not cultivated without sincere pains. Nature, indeed, creates some models of such refined proportions and such informing spirit that they fall at once into the curves of grace; but these are meant for models, and happily nothing forbids those of lesser merit to attempt the same lesson. Are not some born masters of the piano, full-flown at once over the first difficulties of music? But does this hinder any pupil from six hours’ daily drill, if need be, to grasp the same difficulties? The one end is to be attained, whether instantly or not; and in some cases the most laborious is by all means the most delightful player. Courage, then. The same thing is true of other efforts than those of the key-board; and it is quite as certain that the woman who trains herself to be graceful will be so, as that the clumsy young pedant at the scales will, in time, rush victoriously through the “Shower of Pearls,” the “Cascade of Roses,” or any other drawing-room favorite of gelatinized octaves.

For the first comfort, it must be owned that American women have the least natural grace of any nation in the world. English women are usually well trained in a sort of martinet propriety of attitude which suits their solid contours; but neither Anglo-Saxon race knows an approach to those lengthened curves, those bends of every slender joint and supple muscle, which fill the eye in looking at a woman of Latin race. I watched a Spanish-American girl in the gallery of the United States Senate one night, in order to seize, if possible, her charm of gesture. She was rounded, yet fine in figure, and seemed to be, as I can best phrase it, all muscle. No one could think of her bones as having any more stiffness than the pliant sprays of an elm. She leaned on the railing of the balcony, not straight forward as even the elegant and delicate diplomatic English ladies did, but lengthwise, as if reclining; and the bend of her supple wrist, with the black and gold fan, was simply inimitable to an American woman. Those intransferable curves bewitched the eye even to pain; but something was gained in that five minutes’ study which I reduce to two points: Sideway movements and attitudes please more than those either forward or backward. The secret of grace is to teach every joint of the body to bend all that it can.

Take the last point first, and you have all that you need to teach the finest grace. To the dumb-bells, to the calisthenic exercises and work as if you were qualifying yourself to be a contortionist at a circus. Vitalize every fibre, as the hot-blooded Southerner is vitalized, and the body will play into grace of itself.

The first thing is the hardest—to stand straight. Most people are satisfied indeed to attain this point of physical and polite culture, and never get beyond it. Erect stiffness is better than crookedness. To be admirable, the figure must be perfectly flat in the shoulders. No projecting shoulder-blades, no curves are allowed here, however pleasing they may be elsewhere. A stout figure can hardly be unrefined if it is flat behind. A pair of inelastic shoulder-braces must be called into requisition; and these should be made of coutille, or satin jean, two inches wide, and corded at the edge. Make them barely long enough to reach the belt of the skirts worn, and button on them. Set the shoulders perfectly flat against the wall, and find the distance between their blades; fasten a broad strap the same length—not more than two inches, very likely—by sewing it to the straps behind even with the lower edge of the scapula. This is the best, as well as the cheapest shoulder-brace to be found. If well proportioned, and all the measure taken scant, it can not fail to draw the shoulders into place. Excellent teachers of physical training say that the will alone should be used to force one’s self to stand straight. This is true of a person in perfect health. But round shoulders often result from weakness or sedentary pursuits, against whose influence it is useless to struggle; and I would not debar any half-invalid from the luxury of the support given by a strict pair of braces. They relieve the heart and lungs by throwing the weight of the chest on the back, where it belongs, instead of crowding it down on the breast. To correct the ugly rise of the shoulders which always accompanies curvature, and sometimes exists without it, weights must be used. Nothing is more unfeminine than the straight line of shoulder, which properly belongs to a cuirassier or an athlete. Some mothers make their young folks walk the floor with a pail of water in each hand, to give their shoulders a graceful droop. A substitute may be worn in one’s room while at work, in the shape of an outside brace of triple gray linen, having two extra straps buckling round the tip of each shoulder, one long end reaching the belt, with a wedge-shaped lead or iron weight hooked on it. This is heroic practice, but effectual; and its pains are amply compensated by lines of figure which are the surest exponents of high breeding.

The position of the feet is not to be neglected in the lesson of standing. The toes should be widely turned out, to balance well; and if the foot is inclined to turn in, this may be remedied by having the boot heels made higher on the inside. This will throw the foot into a position to develop the arched instep. A crooked leg is a matter for surgical treatment; and in these days of curative ingenuity, with steel braces it will be but the work of a few months to bring the most awkward limb into shape. Those who have seen the wonders wrought with deformed children who have crooked limbs and bodies will consider it a simple matter to bring a partial disfiguration under control. As to the size of the feet, sensible people will never be persuaded that any degree of pressure which can be borne without suffering is injurious. Nature knows how to protect herself. A clever old shoe-dealer gave as his experience that people who always wear tight shoes never have corns. It is the alternation of tight and loose shoes that gives rise to these torments.

The great-toe joint ought not to project beyond the line of the foot. I know a zealous young girl who regularly screwed her bare foot up in a linen bandage before going to bed, to keep it in shape. For painful swelling of the feet in warm weather, no remedy is as effectual as an ice-cold foot-bath for five minutes in the evening or when they are most troublesome. This, however, must never be taken without first wetting the head plentifully with ice-water, and keeping a cold bandage on it all the while. It is good to soak the feet for fifteen minutes in warm water at least twice a week. This keeps them elastic, and in delicate, pliant condition.

An elegant carriage is the patent of nature’s nobility, and appears of itself when the body is held into proper attitudes, and made properly elastic by exercise. The great cause of all stiffness is want of exertion—a general rustiness of all the limbs. To the slender child of the South the climate supplies a degree of relaxation and suppleness which dispenses with the need of action. The women of South American colonies seldom walk for exercise, yet their movements are full of grace. The stimulus of thorough circulation, so potent and softening, can only be gained in our colder latitude by exertion. A lazy woman may be picturesque in a room or in a carriage, but never on foot. Americans have one-sided ideas of grace in walking. A woman as straight as a dart, who moves without any perceptible movement of the hips or limbs, is considered an excellent walker. But this unvarying rectitude is far from the poetry of motion. Watch the slight balancement of a graceful French woman, and you will see an ease, a spontaneity, and variety of motion which set the former by comparison in the light of a bodkin out for a “constitutional.” A fine walk is an affair of proper balance.

A clever friend, who has spent more time in the study of women’s ways and manners in different countries than one can think profitable, has some unique views on the subject of their walking. He says the haughty women of Old Spain carry their weight mainly on the hips, which gives an indescribable stiffness of demeanor. Americans do the same, throwing the weight a little more on the thigh, without bending the knee. French women carry the weight on the calf of the leg, and the knee bends very much at each step, while the body is carried with the least balancement of the shoulders, and the head, so far from being held like a cockade, or the head of tongs, is easy. La tête dégagée, les épaules tombante is the rule for a good style. Try the difference of contracting the muscles in the calf of the leg in walking, with the knee bent sensibly at each step. The body involuntarily throws itself back, and a lightness of motion is the result, which is impossible with the usual swing of the leg from the hips in the stiff walk of Saxon women. The same authority says that the far-famed serpentine glide of the creole, which travelers admire and vainly try to describe, comes from a peculiar movement of the hips. The weight of the figure is thrown on the loins, and half of the body moves alternately at each step, not in a wriggle, as it is caricatured at the North, but with a soft turn of the shoulders corresponding, and a smoothness which betrays the sensuous temperament and luxurious physique. Such is the walk of the women of Venezuela, Bogota, and La Plata. Such a gait, however, would hardly be accepted in the Champs Elysées as suggestive of high refinement. The women of Alabama and Georgia have traits enough of this walk to make them among the most graceful in the world, as far as carriage goes. The creoles of the Gulf have this sinuous glide, betraying a flexibility of limb which we can scarcely imagine. To gain this pliancy, twisting movements of gymnastics are especially suitable. Gyrations of each limb, the head and body, produce, in a few weeks’ practice, an enviable degree of elasticity, which gives the carriage something more than the up and down, forward and back, straight lines of motion with which ladies ordinarily favor us. A smooth, long step, the weight of the body on the loins, where nature intended it should be, and the legs propelled from thence, without stiffness at the knee or obtrusive motion of the hips, is, probably, the ideal of walking; such as one finds both in a highly trained woman and in the untaught perfection of a South Sea Islander.

I have spoken at length on the topic of walking, because its importance as an art of grace can not be overrated, and because it has a still deeper bearing on women’s health. The training which secures an elegant carriage is precisely that which counteracts the tendency to a dozen fatal relaxations at different points of the frame, and prevents their appearance. No one ought to say that walking brings on the disorders which blanch and wither feminine life. The cause is the fatal, inherited weakness of constitution, shown by either undue redness or pallor, by indolence or excitability, which is a slow decay from its first breath, and poisons the hopes and the loveliness of so many women. These doomed beings must work out their own salvation, and make themselves anew in the effort. The weaknesses would develop whether they walked or not. The care should be to adjust exercise and nourishment, stimulus and rest, in due proportion. But the weak woman must have separate counsel, for she by no means comes under the head of these unpremeditated consultations.

CHAPTER IV.

N. P. Willis as a Critic of Beauty.—The Perfume of the Presence.—Charm of Good Circulation.—Chills are Incipient Congestion.—Paper Clothing.—Luxuries of the Bath.—A Substitute for Sea-Baths.—To Secure Fragrant Breath.—Delicate Dentifrices.—Fine Cologne.—A List of Fragrance.

When Willis died, American society lost its great personal critic. No other writer shows such insight into the subtile elements of women’s beauty, or speaks so assuredly on points of mere outward attraction. That gentle and gracious critic who blesses the order of Old Bachelors dissects feminine manner with zest, but is not given to that mention of ear-locks and finger-tips which made “People I have Met” such a conserve of hints for the dressing-table. It is a pity such a connoisseur of feminine graces could not have taken half a hundred distinguished specimens into his training to show the world such women as fill the ideal of a refined man of the world. Willis was susceptible to beauty wherever he found it: a perfect ear on the head of a plain country girl would not miss the glance of this artist, and he betrays what single charms may rivet the regard of a man of taste a dozen times in those glorious sketches we never hope to see excelled.

You remember one of his heroines was remarkable for the perfume which exhaled from her person. We are not to suppose that this most fascinating gift was due to Coudray’s sachets, or to hedyosima on her hair. From repeated experience, verified by that of very discerning and sensitive persons, it is affirmed that certain people of fine organism and perfect health have a fragrance belonging to their presence like scent to a flower. One of the most powerful feminine novelists of the day said that she always knew when a favorite brother had been in a room by the slight indefinable perfume that followed him. His pillow breathed it, and his easy-chair, and it was perceived even by comparative strangers. I have known persons innocent of using perfume, whose fragrant presence was recognized by every one who came near them. In all cases this was accompanied by a bodily condition of perfect health and much magnetic attraction. This may be named the first in that list of subtile personal properties which constitute the strongest and most enduring of physical charms, and which are not discussed with any proportion to their potency. We do not stop to ask what pleases us; refinement attracts, sweetness detains us, and we are only too glad to lie under the spell.

May a plain woman reach her hand for these gifts of pleasing? Surely. They were meant to be nature’s compensation for the lack of chiseled features and ruffled tresses. To reach this subtile refinement requires such preparation as the virgins underwent for the court of Ahasuerus: “Six months with oil of myrrh, and six months with sweet odors”—if not in kind, yet in care.

The secret of lively spirits, even temper, and magnetic presence can never be attained in the world without a perfect circulation of the blood. It may be out of season to say that people often keep themselves too cold; but lay the hint away till next October, when the weather changes, and mark the facts. Our seasons are two thirds cold or chilly; our habits are sedentary, which tends to reduce the force of the system; as a people we are not of excitable temperament; and yet stout men and hearty doctors, who go rushing through their business all day, complain because women sit in overheated rooms, and can not endure draughts in the halls. There is but one answer to this: Nature is her own guide, and it is one of her laws that no creature can be uncomfortable in any way without losing by it. If the tone of the system is so low that a woman feels chilly in a room at seventy degrees, put the heat at once up to eighty, or higher, till she feels luxuriously warm. Chilliness is a symptom to be most dreaded. When the blood forsakes the skin, it clogs the heart, the internal organs, and lays the train for those diseases of the time—neuralgia, paralysis, rheumatism, and congestion. In fact, every person who suffers from one of these stupid chills is in a state of incipient congestion. How hateful is the miserable economy which stints fires in the raw days of May and September, because the calendar of household routine decrees that it is not the season for stoves and grates! Not less irritating is it to sit with a circle half shivering in a large parlor, because the full-blooded, active master of the house has decided that it is nonsense to turn the heat on. The slow tortures such unfeeling people inflict on their innocent victims will be witnesses against them some day, to their great surprise.

Even in summer many delicate persons find the skin always cold. Those who are so susceptible should never be without protection. The most convenient is a sheet of tissue paper quilted in marcelline silk, and worn between the shoulders, the most sensitive point of the whole body for feeling cold. The comfort of this slight device can hardly be imagined. Paper is a non-conductor of heat, but porous enough to admit air, so that it never leaves the dampness of rubber or oil-silk protectors. Even in winter the warmth of these slender linings exceeds that of a sheet of wadding. In the change of the year, when it is not cold enough for flannel, and one can not be comfortable without some extra clothing, this is just what is wanted. A sheet of quilted paper should be worn for the back, and one for the chest, the arms cased in the legs cut from old silk or thread stockings, which cling to the flesh, and keep it from the air better than any other article. Thus equipped, a delicate woman may face the subtle chills of spring and autumn without a shiver. Added warmth is not necessary about the trunk of the body till extreme cold weather. Clothes fit closely there, and the vital centres always generate most heat, so that only the extremities and the upper part of the chest need protection.

The daily bath needs to be administered with some care. The value of hot bathing is hardly understood. In congested circulation nothing is so effective as a ten minutes’ bath at eighty-five degrees, the water covering the body entirely, followed by a cold sponge-bath, quickly given, and immediate drying. Bath-towels are not half large enough as commonly made. They should be small sheets in size, like the real Turkish bath-towels used by the women of Constantinople, which envelop the body, and dry it at once. A bath should never chill one, and the feelings may be safely trusted as guides in the matter. To a constitution strong enough to meet it, even though somewhat depressed at the time, nothing is so inviting as the stimulus of the cold bath, the instant’s chill followed by the rush of warm blood all over the body. For weak systems an invigorant is found, so simple and effective that the wonder is why it was not used long ago. When the season or circumstances forbid a stay on the sea-coast, a substitute nearly if not quite as strengthening is found in an ammonia bath. A gill of liquid ammonia in a pail of water makes an invigorating solution, whose delightful effects can only be compared to a plunge in the surf. Weak persons will find this a luxury and a tonic beyond compare. It cleanses the skin, and stimulates it wonderfully. After such a bath the flesh feels firm and cool like marble. More than this, the ammonia purifies the body from all odor of perspiration. Those in whom the secretion is unpleasant will find relief by using a spoonful of the tincture in a basin of water, and washing the armpits well with it every morning. The feet may be rid of odor in the same way.

But what shall destroy that foe to sentiment, that bane of all beauty, an offensive breath? I can not imagine a woman could fall in love with Hyperion if he had this drawback. The suggestion of unrefinement and of physical disorder it gives would weigh against all the moral and intellectual worth which might lie behind it. The antidote, happily, is as simple as the evil is prevailing. With attention to the health, and brushing the teeth at least night and morning, all besides that is needed to secure a sweet breath is to dissolve a bit of licorice the size of a cent in the mouth after using the tooth-brush. This will even counteract the effects of indigestion, and does not convey the unpleasant suggestion of cachous and spice, that they are used to hide an offense. Licorice has no smell, but it sweetens the mouth and stomach. A stick of it should be chipped for use, and kept in a box on the toilette.

A tincture which restores soundness to the gums is one ounce of coarsely powdered Peruvian bark steeped in half a pint of brandy for a fortnight. Gargle the mouth night and morning with a teaspoonful of this tincture, diluted with an equal quantity of rose-water.

For decaying teeth make a balsam of two scruples of myrrh in fine powder, a scruple of juniper gum, and ten grains of rock alum, mixed in honey, and apply often.

It is useful also to chew a bit of orris-root, which Browning says Florentine ladies love to use in mass-time; or to wash the mouth with the tincture of myrrh, or take a bit of myrrh the size of a hazel-nut at night, or a piece of burned alum.

A very agreeable dentifrice is made from an ounce of myrrh in fine powder and a little powdered green sage, mixed with two spoonfuls of white honey. The teeth should be washed with it every night and morning.

To clean the teeth, rub them with the ashes of burned bread. It must be thoroughly burned, not charred.

Spite of all that is said against it, charcoal holds the highest place as a tooth-powder. It has the property, too, of opposing putrefaction, and destroying vices of the gums. It is most conveniently used when made into paste with honey.

A fine Cologne is prepared from one gallon of deodorized alcohol, or spirit obtained from the Catawba grape, which is nearly if not quite equal to the grape spirit which gives Farina Cologne its value. To this is added one ounce of oil of lavender, one ounce of oil of orange, two drachms of oil of cedrat, one drachm of oil of neroli or orange flowers, one drachm of oil of rose, and one drachm of ambergris. Mix well, and keep for three weeks in a cool place.

To this list of fragrance add a recipe for common Cologne to use as a toilet water. It is oil of bergamot, lavender, and lemon, each one drachm; oil of rose and jasmine, each ten drops; essence of ambergris, ten drops; spirits of wine, one pint. Mix and keep well closed in a cool place for two months, when it will be fit for use. Ladies will be grateful for this who have known what trouble it is to find a refreshing Cologne which does not smell like cooking extract with lemon or vanilla. If with these hints a woman can not keep herself fragrant and lovely in person, her case must need the help of the physician.

CHAPTER V.

Morals of Paint and Powder.—Antique Toilet Arts.—Washington Ladies.—Making Up the Face.—Whitening the Arms.—Tints of Rouge.—To Make French Rouge.—Milk of Roses.—Greuze Tints.—Coarse Complexions Caused by Powder.—Color for the Lips.—Crystal and Gold Hair Powder.—Dyeing Blonde Wigs.—To Darken the Hair.—Champagne and Black-Walnut Bark.—Doom of the Complexion Artist.

The time has gone by when it was a matter of church discipline if a woman painted her face or wore powder. Nor is it any serious reflection on her moral character if she go abroad with her complexion made up in the forenoon, however it may call her taste in question. All who paint their faces and look forth at their windows are not visited with hard names, else the parlor of every house on the side-streets of New York might have its Jezebel waiting the dinner-hour and the return of masculine admirers. George declares he could never own a wife who used powder; and yet Annie comes down, looking innocent in her pink bows, with a little white bloom on each temple, and a suspicious odor of Lubin’s Violet floating round her. I don’t think George meditates divorce on that account. There is something noble and ingenuous in the sight of an uncovered skin; but we reconcile ourselves to the pearly falsehood, accepting the situation with the false hair, not so gray as it is in front, and the long, artificial-shaped nails, and the cramped feet. Every body knows they are inventions, and accepts them as such, like paste brilliants at a theatre.

The arts of the toilet are as old as Thebes. The painted eye of desire, the burning cheek and dyed nails, were coeval with the wisdom of Alexandria. Of old the Roman ladies used the fine dust of calcined shells and the juices of plants to restore their freshness of color. There is no end to the modern contrivances for the same purpose. Crushed geranium leaves, and the petals of artificial roses which contain carmine, friction with red flannel, and the juice of strawberries, are homely substitutes for rouge. The women of the South are more given to the use of cosmetics than their Northern sisters. Perhaps Washington sets the example to all the states; for nowhere else is seen such liberal use of paint and powder, skillfully applied, as at the capital. There women paint for the breakfast-table, and carry the deception every where. The Spanish-American ladies make the absurd mistake of supposing their rich complexions and dark eyes are not more enticing to Northern eyes than our own cold beauties; so, by the help of toilet bottles, they present faces like Lady Washington geraniums from nine in the morning till they ice themselves to frozen whiteness for the evenings. Whited sepulchres is the phrase forever ringing in one’s head at sight of this folly. What indignation has seized one at sight of Madame ——, the witty and enviable, who had the weakness to mask her lustrous, tropical, Murillo colors—which enchanted every Northern heart—with poor plaster of burned oyster-shells! It was very well for the Treasury blondes, who looked like human peaches till one saw them close, to dabble in white and pink. It suited their style. For these superb Creoles and Sevillians, never!

Both from principle and preference, this book discountenances paint and powder. It believes that a woman needs no other cosmetics than fresh air, exercise, and pure water, which, if freely used, will impart a ruddier glow and more pearly tint to the face than all the rouge and lily-white in Christendom.

But if she must resort to artificial beauty, let her be artistic about it, and not lay on paint as one would furniture polish, to be rubbed in with rags. The best and cheapest powder is refined chalk in little pellets, each enough for an application. Powder is a protection and comfort on long journeys or in the city dust. If the pores of the skin must be filled, one would prefer clean dust, to begin with. A layer of powder will prevent freckles and sun-burn when properly applied. It cools feverish skins, and its use can be condoned when it modifies the contrast between red arms and white evening dresses. In amateur theatricals it is indispensable, the foot-lights throwing the worst construction on even good complexions. In all these cases it is worth while to know how to use it well. The skin should be as clean and cool as possible, to begin. A pellet of chalk, without any poisonous bismuth in it, should be wrapped in coarse linen and crushed in water, grinding it well between the fingers. Then wash the face quickly with the linen, and the wet powder oozes in its finest state through the cloth, leaving a pure white deposit when dry. Press the face lightly with a damp handkerchief to remove superfluous powder, wiping the brows and nostrils free. This mode of using chalk is less easily detected than when it is dusted on dry.

The best foundation for Lubin’s powder is gained by soaping the face well, and taking care not to rinse off all the smooth, glossy feeling it leaves. Dry the face without wiping, and the thinnest layer of oil is left, which holds the dry powder, without that mealy look which Lubin is apt to leave. To whiten the arms for theatricals, rub them first with glycerine, not letting the skin absorb it all, and apply chalk. The country practice is to substitute a tallow candle for the glycerine; but ours is a progressive age. At least the moral feeling leads one to spare an escort’s coat-sleeve.

Rouge needs consideration before rashly applying. There are more tints of complexion than there are roses, and one can only be successful by observing the natural colors of a beauty of her own type. Some cheeks have a wine-like, purplish glow, others a transparent saffron tinge, like yellowish-pink porcelain; others still have clear, pale carmine; and the rarest of all, that suffused tint like apple blossoms. By making her own rouge a lady can graduate her pallet—that is to say, her cheeks—at pleasure. The following preparations have the virtue, at least, of being harmless, which can not be said of most paints and powders. Red-lead, bismuth, arsenic, and poisonous vegetable compounds are used in the common cosmetics. Bismuth is most frequent; and its least effect is to give the cheeks it has whitened a crop of purplish pimples, which would indicate that the wearer was freely “dispoged” to the same tastes as Sairey Gamp. The hideously coarse complexion of many public singers is partly due to their use of bismuth powder. An old dispensatory gives the following formula for a harmless cosmetic under the name of Almond Bloom:

Take of Brazil dust, one ounce; water, three pints; boil, strain, and add six drachms of isinglass, two of cochineal, three of borax, and an ounce of alum; boil again, and strain through a fine cloth. Use as a liquid cosmetic.

Devoux French rouge is thus prepared: Carmine, half a drachm; oil of almonds, one drachm; French chalk, two ounces. Mix. This makes a dry rouge.

The milk of roses is made by mixing four ounces of oil of almonds, forty drops of oil of tartar, and half a pint of rose-water with carmine to the proper shade. This is very soothing to the skin. Different tinges may be given to the rouge by adding a few flakes of indigo for the deep black-rose crimson, or mixing a little pale yellow with less carmine for the soft Greuze tints. All preparations for darkening the eyebrows, eyelashes, etc., must be put on with a small hair-pencil. The “dirty-finger” effect is not good. A fine line of black round the rim of the eyelid, when properly done, should not be detected, and its effect in softening and enlarging the appearance of the eyes is well known by all amateur players. A smeared, blotchy look conveys an unpleasant idea of dissipation.

For the finger-tips, alkanet makes a good stain. An eighth of an ounce of chippings tied in coarse muslin, and soaked for a week in diluted alcohol, will give a tincture of lovely dye. The finger-tips should be touched with jewelers’ cotton dipped in this mixture.

Hair-powder is made from powdered starch, sifted through muslin, and scented with oil of roses in the proportion of twelve drops to the pound. Crystal powder is glass dust, obtained from factories, or powdered crystallized salts of different kinds. A golden powder may be procured by coloring a saturated solution of alum bright yellow with turmeric, then allowing it to crystallize, and reducing it to coarse powder. This certainly has the merit of cheapness.

Color for the lips is nothing more than cold cream, with a larger quantity of wax than usual melted in it, with a few drachms of carmine. For vermilion tint use a strong infusion of alkanet instead of poisonous red-lead. Keep the chippings for a week in the almond-oil of which the cold cream is made, and afterward incorporate with wax and spermaceti. Always tie alkanet in muslin when it is used for coloring purposes.

When blonde wigs are not attainable for theatricals, a switch of dark hair may be bleached by soaking in strong vinegar, and colored by an infusion of turmeric in Champagne, or by the liquor obtained from the tops of potatoes ready to flower, mixed with water, suffering it to steep twenty-four hours. This is too poisonous ever to be used on the head with safety.

The walnut stain for skin or hair is made precisely like that for cloth, by boiling the bark—say an ounce to a pint of water—for an hour, slowly, and adding a lump of alum the size of a thimble to set the dye. Apply with a little brush, such as is used in water-colors, to the lashes and eyebrows, or with a sponge to the hair. Wrap the head in an old handkerchief when going to sleep, or the moisture of the hair will stain the pillow-cases.

But one thing must be said: the woman who has once taken to painting and coloring must go on painting and coloring; rarely, if ever, does the complexion regain its bloom, the skin its smoothness, or the hair its gloss. In most cases the operator must go on deepening the hue, and in no case can he or she be sure of the shade or tint which successive applications will produce.

CHAPTER VI.

Récamier’s Training.—Diana of Poitiers, Bath.—High Beauty of Maturity.—The Worth of Beauty.—George Eliot on Complexions.—Dr. Cazenave.—Barley Paste for the Face.—Prescriptions of the Roman Ladies.—To Remove Pimples.—Cascarilla Wash.—Varnish for Wrinkles.—Acetic Acid for Comedones.—To Remove Mask.—Lady Mary Montagu.—Habit of Italian Ladies.—Wash of Vitriol.

The motto that used to haunt our souls over copy-books, “No excellence without great labor,” is as true about personal improvement as any thing else. Few celebrated beauties have gained their fame without use of those arts which must be the earliest of all, since we have no record of their first teaching—the arts of the toilette. Madame Récamier, who exercised more power by her beauty than any woman of modern times, was bred by a most careful mother, versed in all the mysteries of training. Her exceeding delicacy of complexion arose from the protection she gave it, never going out except in her carriage, and scarcely knowing what it was to set foot to the ground. Margaret of Anjou and Mary Stuart, in earlier times, were wise as serpents in the magic of the toilet, disdaining neither May dew nor less simple lotions for cheeks whereon the eye of the world was to dwell. Diana of Poitiers bequeathed a legacy of value to her sex in commending the use of the rain-water bath, which preserved her own beauty till, at the age of sixty-five, no one could be insensible to her. Ninon de l’Enclos left the same testimony. It is intolerable that women have not the ambition to preserve their health and charms to the latest date, and give up their cases so shamefully soon. An intelligent maturity chisels and refines the face to a high and feeling beauty; that is to the attractions of youth what the aristocratic head of Booth would be beside a pink-and-white lady-killer of society. This serene and finished expression should find physical favor to accompany it. Nor is this to be gained, as many say, by leading a passive, emotionless life. People of vivid feeling are the youngest. Their quick alterations of mood make the face clean cut, yet do not settle it in uniform furrows. Both grief and joy, yearning passion and utter renunciation, are needed to sculpture finely the statues for remembrance. No one professing the loftiest aims, who understands human nature, can despise the care of personal beauty when, combined with moral worth, its influence is so irresistible. Look at the portraits of those renowned as moral and intellectual heroes; it will be found their greatness was rarely associated with physical repulsiveness, and though their faces in the conflicts of life grew seamed and worn, yet in youth they must have been more than ordinarily remarked for beauty of a high order—Columbus and Galileo and Whitefield will do for examples. And if the reader go through the range of feminine celebrities, from the poets to missionary biographies, “with portrait of the original,” not one face in ten will dispute what I have said.

Least of all let any woman heed smiling scorn of her weakness in taking pains to secure a good complexion—the real clearness and color, if she eschew the coarse pretense of powder and paint. George Eliot, with her masculine sense, bears witness to the irresistible tendency to associate a pure soul with a lucent complexion. No woman can be disagreeable if she have this saving claim; and there will be no apology for adding a few estimable recipes for the purpose from the collection of a foreign physician, Dr. Cazenave. He recommends the following as a composition for the face:

Three ounces of ground barley, one ounce of honey, and the white of one egg, mixed to a paste, and spread thickly on the cheeks, nose, and forehead, before going to bed. This must remain all night, protecting the face by a soft handkerchief, or bits of lawn laid over the parts on which the paste is applied. Wash it off with warm water, wetting the surface with a sponge, and letting it soften while dressing the hair or finishing one’s bath. Repeat nightly till the skin grows perfectly fine and soft, which should be in three weeks, after which it will be enough to use it once a week. Always wash the face with warm water and mild soap, rubbing on a little cold cream when exposing one’s self to the weather. This paste was used by the Romans. With this, care must be taken to bathe daily in warm water, using soap freely, toning the system with a cold plunge afterward, if one can bear it.

For pimples use this recipe: thirty-six grains of bicarbonate of soda, one drachm of glycerine, one ounce of spermaceti ointment. Rub on the face; let it remain for a quarter of an hour, and wipe off all but a slight film with a soft cloth.

The best wash for the complexion given is cascarilla powder, two grains; muriate of ammonia, two grains; emulsion of almonds, eight ounces: apply with fine linen. The frightful discoloration known as mask is removed by a wash made from thirty grains of the chlorate of potash in eight ounces of rose-water. Wrinkles are less apparent under a kind of varnish containing thirty-six grains of turpentine in three drachms of alcohol, allowed to dry on the face. The black worms called comedones call forth the simple specific of thirty-six grains of subcarbonate of soda in eight ounces of distilled water, perfumed with six drachms of essence of roses. But I prefer the advice of a clever home physician, who lately told me that he removed comedones from the faces of girls who applied to him for the purpose by touching the head of each with a fine hair-pencil dipped in acetic acid—a nice operation, as the acid must only touch the black spot, or it will eat the skin. Remembering that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu quoted the habit of Italian ladies to renew and refine their complexions by a wash of vitriol, I begged to know how such a heroic application could safely be made. The answer was that muriatic acid, sixty per cent. strong, diluted in twelve parts of water, might be used as a wash, and gradually eat away the coarse outer envelope of the skin, if any one had fortitude to bear a slow cautery like this. Lady Mary records that she had to shut herself up most of a week, and her face meantime was blistered shockingly; but afterward the Italian ladies assured her that her complexion was vastly improved. On the whole, the typhoid fever is preferable as an agent for clearing the complexion, being perhaps less dangerous and more effective.

CHAPTER VII.

Shining Pallor.—Lustrous Faces.—Golden Freckles.—Tiger-Lily Spots.—Sun Photographs.—Nitre Removes Freckles.—Old English Prescription.—For Yachting.—Almond-Oil.—Buttermilk as a Cosmetic.—Rosemary and Glycerine.—Lotion for Prickly Heat.—For Musquitoes.—Protecting Hair from Sea Air.—Fashionable Gray Hair.—Dark Eyes and Silver Hair.—To Restore Dark Hair.—Bandoline.—Cold Cream.—Almond Pomade.—For Skin Diseases.—Sulphurous Acid.

The summer heats, which make nature lovely, are the bane of our fair-skinned Northern girls. Southern frames receive the glowing warmth, and grow paler and paler, because—giving a matter of fact explanation of a beautiful appearance—the surface of the skin is cooled by the perspiration, and the blood retreats to the central veins. The “shining pallor” which poets love on the faces of their favorite creations is the sign and effect of concentrated passion of any kind in a quick, electric nature. I disbelieved in the expression a long time, classing it with the “marble flush” and such freaks of nature in novels; but the peculiar look has come under my eye more than once. It is a very striking one, as if the light came from within—a lustrous, elevated expression, too ethereal and of the spirit to be merely high-bred. It is one of the refinements Nature gives to her ideal pieces of humanity, and nothing coarse lurks in the creation of the one who presents it. The Southern pallor is quite different—a dead but clear olive, very admirable when the skin is fine. Northern paleness is relieved rather than disfigured by a few golden freckles. They are more piquant than otherwise; and girls with the pure complexion which attends auburn, blonde, and brown hair ought to consider them as caprices of nature to blend the hues of bright, warm hair and snowy skin. When as large, and almost as dark as the patches on the tiger-lily, every one will find them something to get rid of with dispatch. Freckles indicate an excess of iron in the blood, the sun acting on the particles in the skin as it does on indelible ink, bringing out the color. A very simple way of removing them is said to be as follows:

Take finely powdered nitre (saltpetre), and apply it to the freckles by the finger moistened with water and dipped in the powder. When perfectly done and judiciously repeated, it will remove them effectually without trouble.

An old English prescription for the skin is to take half a pint of blue skim-milk, slice into it as much cucumber as it will cover, and let it stand an hour; then bathe the face and hands, washing them off with fair water when the cucumber extract is dry. The latter is said to stimulate the growth of hair where it is lacking, if well and frequently rubbed in. It would be worth while to apply it to high foreheads and bald crowns.

Rough skins, from exposure to the wind in riding, rowing, or yachting, trouble many ladies, who will be glad to know that an application of cold cream or glycerine at night, washed off with fine carbolic soap in the morning, will render them presentable at the breakfast-table, without looking like women who follow the hounds, blowzy and burned. The simplest way to obviate the bad effects of too free sun and wind, which are apt on occasion to revenge themselves for the neglect too often shown them by the fair sex, is to rub the face, throat, and arms well with cold cream or pure almond-oil before going out. With this precaution one may come home from a berry-party or a sail without a trace of that ginger-bread effect too apt to follow those pleasures. Cold cream made from almond-oil, with no lard or tallow about it, will answer every end proposed by the use of buttermilk, a favorite country prescription, but one which young ladies can hardly prefer as a cosmetic on account of its odor.

A delicate and effective preparation for rough skins, eruptive diseases, cuts, or ulcers is found in a mixture of one ounce of glycerine, half an ounce of rosemary-water, and twenty drops of carbolic acid. In those dreaded irritations of the skin occurring in summer, such as hives or prickly heat, this wash gives soothing relief. The carbolic acid neutralizes the poison of the blood, purifies and disinfects the eruption, and heals it rapidly. A solution of this acid, say fifty drops to an ounce of the glycerine, applied at night, forms a protection from musquitoes. Though many people consider the remedy equal to the disease, constant use very soon reconciles one to the creosotic odor of the carbolic acid, especially if the pure crystallized form is used, which is far less overpowering in its fragrance than the common sort. Those who dislike it too much to use it at night, will find the sting of the bites almost miraculously cured and the blotches removed by touching them with the mixture in the morning. This is penned with grateful recollection of its efficiency after the bites of Jersey musquitoes a few nights ago. Babies and children should be touched with it in reduced form, to relieve the pain they feel from insect bites, but do not know how to express except by worrying. Two or three drops of attar of roses in the preparation disguises the smell so as to render it tolerable to human beings, though not so to musquitoes.

Ladies who find that sea air turns their hair gray, or who are fearful of such a result, should keep it carefully oiled with some vegetable oil; not glycerine, as that combines with water too readily to protect the locks. The recipe for cold cream made with more of the almond-oil, so as to form a salve, is not a bad sea-dressing for the hair, and the spermaceti and wax render it less greasy than ordinary preparations. Animal pomades grow rancid, and make the head most unpleasant to touch and smell.

Many preparations are given to restore the color to dark hair when it is lost through ill health or over-study. The fashionables to-day, with true taste, admire gray hair when in profusion, and deem it distinguished when accompanied by dark eyes, to which the contrast adds a piercing lustre. But those who consider themselves defrauded of their natural tints may use this recipe: Tincture of acetate of iron, one ounce; water, one pint; glycerine, half an ounce; sulphuret of potassium, five grains. Mix well, and let the bottle remain uncovered to pass out the foul smell arising from the potassium. Afterward add a few drops of ambergris or attar of roses. Rub a little of this daily into the hair, which it will restore to its original color, and benefit the health of the scalp.

Ladies are annoyed by the tendency of their hair to come out of crimp or curl while boating or horseback-riding. The only help is to apply the following bandoline before putting the hair in papers or irons: A quarter of an ounce of gum-tragacanth, one pint of rose-water, five drops of glycerine; mix and let stand overnight. If the tragacanth is not dissolved, let it be half a day longer; if too thick, add more rose-water, and let it be for some hours. When it is a smooth solution, nearly as thin as glycerine, it is fit to use. This is excellent for making the hair curl. Moisten a lock of hair with it, not too wet, and brush round a warm curling-iron, or put up in papillotes. If the curl come out harsh and stiff, brush it round a cold iron or curling-stick with a very little of the cosmetic for keeping stray hair in place, or cold cream. To the recipe given in the last chapter another is added, of perhaps finer proportions: Oil of sweet almonds, five parts; spermaceti, three parts; white wax, half a part; attar of roses, three to five drops. Melt together in a shallow dish, over hot water, strain through a piece of muslin when melted, and as it begins to cool beat it with a silver spoon till quite cold and of a snowy whiteness. It is well to rub it smooth on a slab of marble or porcelain before putting in glass boxes to keep. For the hair use seven parts of almond-oil to the other proportions named. The secret of making fine cold cream lies in stirring and beating it well all the time it is cooling.

Those who have the misfortune to contract cutaneous disorders arising from exposure to the contact of the low and degraded—and charitable persons sometimes run narrow risks of this kind—or from scorbutic affections or the fumes of certain medicines, each and any of which are liable to produce roughness and inflammation of the skin, will be glad of a speedy and certain cure for their affliction. It is a wash of sulphurous acid (not sulphuric), diluted in the proportion of three parts of soft water to one of the acid, and used three or four times a day till relieved. I knew a young lady whose fine complexion was ruined by the fumes of medicine she administered to her grandmother, whom she tended with religious care; and, thinking there may be others in like case, hasten to give this prescription. Sub rosa—all parasites on furniture, human beings, or pets are quickly destroyed by this application.

CHAPTER VIII.

Service of Beauty.—Not for Vanity, but Perfection.—Eyebrows of Petrarch’s Laura.—Fashionable Baths.—Trimming the Eyelashes.—Luxury of the Toilet.—Its Magnetic Influence.—A Safe Stimulant.—Amateurs of the Toilet.—Cosmetic Gloves.—To Refine the Skin of the Shoulders and Arms.—Sulphate of Quinine for the Hair.—For the Eyebrows and Eyelashes.—A Harmless Dye.—To Remove Sallowness.—A Hint for Stout People.—Perfumed Bathing-powder.

It is a wonder that so few educated people address themselves to the service of beauty in the human form. It is refined to study draperies or design costumes for the adornment of the body, but not to develop the perfection of the body itself. Hair-dressers, perfumers, and tailors find ample consolation for being the ninth part of men, or something less, in public estimation, since the world finds their work a necessity, and amply repays it. Who make fortunes faster among the working-classes than those who minister to the desire for beauty, let us call it, rather than the severer name of vanity? The arts of the toilet are advanced to the rank of a profession abroad. English fashion journals declare this in their advertisements. Establishments in London and at fashionable watering-places offer brightly furnished parlors where one may enjoy the luxurious soothing of every appliance of the toilet in succession. The warm bath, in all the appealing pleasure of marble, porcelain, and gold, instead of dingy oil-cloths and reeking zinc basins, gives place to the deft hands of the hair-bather and the chiropodist, and these to the dresser, who arranges the locks, quickly and artificially dried, in the most elegantly simple style. Then comes the cosmetic artist, who removes blotches and specks from the face with quick acids, laves it with soothing washes, or applies emollient pastes which leave soft freshness behind. The vulgarity of paint and enamel is not allowed in these establishments, though the operators have good knowledge of all secrets of their art. Innoxious dyes are used as novices never can apply them, superfluous hairs are removed, and eyebrows and eyelashes are cared for by the most skillful hands. The former have every unnecessary hair removed, and are thinned to the penciled line they form in the portraits of Venetian ladies, who secured this peculiar charm in the same way. If I could only find out how Petrarch’s Laura trimmed her eyebrows, and give the method to my readers!

With a pair of fairy-like scissors the lashes are trimmed a hair-breadth, and brushed with sable pencils conveying an ointment which increases their growth. The nails are polished, and the hands indued with soft and perfumed oils which leave no trace. Picture the luxury of such a place and such attention, instead of the frowzy rooms and careless servants of a common hair-dressing saloon! The magnetic benefit of such operations ought to count for much in elegant physical culture. It unmistakably soothes the system, and freshens its powers better than any narcotic stimulant. More than one of the most brilliant writers of the time is in the habit of bathing and making a full toilet before composition, feeling its magic influence on the mind in rendering one’s thoughts bright and happy.

But blessed water and simples, chemicals and strokings, do their work in stone-ware and top bedrooms as well as in baths lined with porcelain behind the portière of a Pompadour dressing-room. Clever girls can do much for each other in these matters; and let me hope no one will have to ask more than sixteen people before finding a friend with nerve enough to trim her eyelashes for her, as an ambitious maiden once did. A fresh handful of prescriptions for these amateurs is taken from Paris authorities.

Cosmetic gloves for which there is such demand are spread inside with the following preparation: The yolks of two fresh eggs beaten with two teaspoonfuls of the oil of sweet almonds, one ounce of rose-water, and thirty-six drops of tincture of benzoin. Make a paste of this, and either anoint the gloves with it, or spread it freely on the hands and draw the gloves on afterward. Of course there is no virtue in the gloves save as they protect the hands from drying or soiling the bed-linen.

A paste for the skin of the shoulders and arms is made from the whites of four eggs boiled in rose-water, with the addition of a grain or two of alum, beaten till thick. Spread this on the skin and cover with old linen. Wear it overnight, or all the afternoon before a party where one desires to appear in full dress. This cosmetic gives great firmness and purity to the skin, and may be used to advantage by persons having soft, flabby flesh.

A wash to stimulate the growth of hair in case of baldness is made from equal parts of the tincture of sulphate of quinine and aromatic tincture.

For causing the eyebrows to grow when lost by fire, use the sulphate of quinine—five grains in an ounce of alcohol.

For the eyelashes, five grains of the sulphate in an ounce of sweet almond-oil is the best prescription; put on the roots of the lashes with the finest sable pencil. This must be lightly applied, for it irritates the eye to finger it.

The best dye is this French recipe, which is seen to be harmless at a glance: Melt together, in a bowl set in boiling water, four ounces of white wax in nine ounces of olive-oil, stirring in, when melted and mixed, two ounces of burned cork in powder. This will not take the dull bluish tinge of metallic dyes, but gives a lustrous blackness to the hair like life. To apply it, put on old gloves, cover the shoulders carefully to protect the dress, and spread the salvy preparation like pomade on the head, brushing it well in and through the hair. It changes the color instantly, as it is a black dressing rather than a dye. A brown tint may be given by steeping an ounce of walnut bark, tied in coarse close muslin, in the oil for a week before boiling. The bark is to be had at any large drug-store, for about thirty cents an ounce.

The recipes which follow will be of special value in the warm days of early spring. The first contains nearly all the vegetable medicines in common use for purifying the blood, and will prevent the lassitude and bilious symptoms which overcloud many a sweet spring day. When made by one’s own hand, so that the purity and excellence of the ingredients can be insured, the mixture is far better than most of the blood-purifiers and tonics prescribed by the faculty. It is given here because it removes the sallowness and unhealthy iris hues of the complexion at a season when a girl’s cheek should wear its brightest, clearest flame.

Half an ounce each of spruce, hemlock, and sarsaparilla bark, dandelion, burdock, and yellow dock, in one gallon of water; boil half an hour, strain hot, and add ten drops of oil of spruce and sassafras mixed. When cold, add half a pound of brown sugar and half a cup of yeast. Let it stand twelve hours in a jar covered tight, and bottle. Use this freely as an iced drink. This is a good recipe for the root beer which New Yorkers like to taste during warm months.

People inclined to embonpoint feel the burden of mortality oppressive during the first heats of the calendar. They will be glad to hear from a hill-country doctor, whose praise is in many households, that a strong decoction of sassafras drunk frequently will reduce the flesh as rapidly as any remedy known. Take it either iced or hot, as fancied, with sugar if preferred. It is not advisable, however, to take this tea in certain states of health, and the family physician should be consulted before taking it. A strong infusion is made at the rate of an ounce of sassafras to a quart of water. Boil it half an hour very slowly, and let it stand till cold, heating again if desired, and keeping it from the air.

A trouble scarcely to be named among refined persons is profuse perspiration, which ruins clothing and comfort alike. For this it is recommended to bathe the feet, hands, and parts of the body where the secretion is greatest with cold infusion of rosemary, sage, or thyme, and afterward dust the stockings and under-garments with a mixture of two and a half drachms of camphor, four ounces of orris-root, and sixteen ounces of starch, the whole reduced to impalpable powder. Tie it in a coarse muslin bag, and shake it over the clothes. This makes a very fine bathing-powder.

CHAPTER IX.

Hope for Homely People.—Two Vital Charms.—The Way to Live.—Sunrise and Open Air.—Bleached by the Dawn.—Live at Sunny Windows.—In Balconies and Parks.—Christiana’s Breakfast.—Brown Steak and Good-humor.—True Bread.—Device for Stiff Shoulders.—Corsets and Girdles.—The Latter more Needed.—How to be Pleased with One’s Self.

Is there such a being as a hopelessly homely woman? In the light of modern appliances, study the faces and figures one meets on a journey from the sea-board to the interior, and confess that there are few fatally ugly women. On the railway I often amuse myself, in default of better things, by considering how hygiene, cosmetics, and good taste in dress would transform the common-looking women about one into charming and even striking personages. In most of them, all that is wanting is strength of expression and a clear complexion, two things with which no woman can be wholly unattractive. The one is the sign of mental, the other of physical health. No wonder nature makes them so winning. To show what I mean, let us mention some common faults, and their antidotes. Nothing is more delightful than pulling our neighbors to pieces, with a good motive for it.

Christiana is over thirty—no reason in the least why she should not be as admired as a three days’ rose, for one of the most beautiful women in New York, whom every one is infatuated with, is over sixty. Yet nobody thinks of Christiana’s looks, for the simple reason that she has given up thinking of them herself—believing her poor skin can not be improved, nor the stiff, high carriage of her shoulders be changed. The depth of her eyes and her really good color are lost with these defects. To judge how the remedies should be applied, scrutinize her entire mode of living. Sunrise, in January or June, and she is not up! This will never serve a candidate for beauty. The first rays of the sun, the purity of early air, have as potent an effect on the complexion as the noon rays on the webs of linen in the bleaching-ground. By all means, if one must rob daylight for sleep, take the hours from ten to three, but see the fires in the east from out-of-doors, even if your head touched the pillow only two hours before. I don’t believe in any special morality in getting up early, but I do know its benefits on nerves and circulation of the blood. There is a tonic in the dew-cool air, a lingering of night’s romance, that stirs while it soothes the blood like a fine magnetic hand.

But getting up and staying in the house won’t improve one’s complexion. How much of her rose-and-lily face the English peasant woman owes to her walk to the reaping-field at daybreak is well known. After the first soft days of February and March there is nothing to hinder Christiana from reading her prayer-book or morning paper on the porch in the sunlight, if she choose to do this rather than rake the dead leaves from the grass, sweep the steps, or do something to stir her laggard blood. If it is cold, let her plant herself at the sunniest window, sew, run her machine, lounge, and eat there, till she is no more afraid of sunshine than of any other blood relation. Our women want to imitate French sense, and sit in the balconies and parks to do their work. When they lose the detestable vice of self-consciousness that saps American well-being in all ways, they will be able to live at their casements, sewing, singing, reading, as thoughtless and unnoticed as the white doves soaring above them where the sunshine is widest. It is matter of custom merely.

But Christiana’s breakfast is ready by this time, and we will see what she eats. Coffee: well, housekeepers buy the ready-ground coffee now, and it is mixed trash, wanting the heartiness of a good pure cup, but no great harm at worst. Meat: do you call that bit the width of two fingers, crisped, greased at one end, raw and bleeding at the other, fit sustenance for a woman who is to grow, work, walk, dance, and sing to-day? She is made to live neither on leather nor raw meat. Cook a slice of thick beef-steak as quickly as possible till the color is changed all the way through without drying any of the juice. The albumen of the blood must be coagulated before meat is fit for human stomachs, and proper cooking means something more than mere warming through, and a great deal less than crisping. Now let at least a quarter of a pound of this browned and fragrant sacrifice be cut for this young woman—better if she eat half a pound—to be converted into energetic work and Christian good-humor in the course of the day. One, two, three, four slices of fried potato withered in fat! And this is what some people call nourishment! Put on her plate two baked potatoes of unimpeachable quality—poor potatoes are poison—and let each be the size of her small fist. Where are the tomatoes, the celery, the artichokes, salads, and sauces? She has tomatoes, three bits in a tiny saucerette, as if it held some East Indian condiment. There ought to be a saucer piled with them, or some savory vegetable delicately cooked; for breakfast ought to be next to the heartiest meal of the day. It is far the best way to take coffee and bread on rising, and eat the meal later when one has worked into an appetite for it. Those who find it impossible to alter their habits enough for this usually have duties which ought to call them up long enough before to be quite hungry by seven or eight o’clock, the usual hours in this country for breakfast.

Take away that thin slip of toast; it makes one turn invalid to see it. What do you call this gray, broad-celled, pallid stuff? Bread—good yeast bread? If there is any thing intolerable, it is what the makers of it commonly call good home-made bread. It is mealy, or bitter, or gray and coarse-grained, sad-looking, with white crust, as if the owners were too poor to afford fire to bake it thoroughly. Give me poor bread, and I can eat it in a spirit of resignation; but this domestic hypocrisy of good bread libels the wheat that made it, and arraigns the taste of those who eat it. Were it ever so good, there is something better yet—the crisp, unbolted cake that lingers with nutty richness on the palate, once tasting of which weans one from the impoverished gentility of white bread forever. It is not urged on the score of being wholesome. The phrase has been so much abused that the cry of “healthful food” invariably suggests something which doesn’t taste good. But the strength and richness and coloring of wheat-cake recommend it to any breakfast fancier. There is no use aiming at fine-grained complexions without the use of coarse bread at every meal. A slice of Graham bread at breakfast will not counteract the evil tendencies of incorrect diet the rest of the day. When you get your coarse bread, two or three slices will not be too much at a meal. Such ought to be the breakfast of a young lady who wishes to have roundness of contour, unfailing spirits, and self-command, with ready strength for walking, working, or study. Brain-work takes food as much as bodily labor. Between Mrs. O’Flaherty in the laundry and the faithful lady editor of a newspaper, it is probable that the former has the easiest time of it, and uses less strength. The women worth any thing are built and sustained by hearty feeding. It is so that singers and dancers eat, and lecturers and authors—Grisi and Jenny Lind, Mrs. Kemble and Ristori, Mrs. Edwards, the novelist, and with her nearly every writer of note at this day. They are well-nourished women, whose appetites would embarrass the candy-loving sylphs whose usefulness amounts to nothing more than that of cheap porcelain. Women who exercise little, of course eat little; in the end they can do nothing, because they are not sufficiently fed. There is no grossness in eating largely if one work well enough to consume the strength afforded. The best engines are best fed. The grossness lies in eating and being idle. A woman who limits her exertions to a walk around the squares daily may confine herself to a slice of toast and a strip of meat. She will grow thin and watery-looking, nervous and “high-strung,” to pay for it. To know what charm there is in womanhood, go among the girls brought up in villages along the coast. The well-poised shoulders that have a will of their own, the round arms and necks, the profusion of hair, the strength and nerve combined in their movements, give one the idea of walking statuary. The poor drooping figures, the stiff shoulders we complain of, come from one cause—lack of nutrition. Their muscles are not strong enough to hold them erect, and their nerves are not fed enough to stimulate the weak muscles to activity. How many times must it be said over? Want of sunshine and nourishing food gives the coarse, uninteresting look to most American women.

If Christiana would invoke mechanical aid to bring down her high shoulders and put flexibility into her chest muscles, after thirty years of abuse, it is easily done. Walking with a pail of water in each hand is rather dull work unless there is a call for domestic help. A homely but very effectual way of educating the muscles is to wear weights fastened to the shoulders. A shawl-strap answers every purpose, buckled on the shoulders with the handle between them on the back, and fastening a flat-iron of five or six pounds’ weight to the straps which hang under the arms. An extra buckle may be sewed half-way down each strap, to fasten the iron on the end by a second loop. The weights may be worn while reading or writing for hours, and will be found rather agreeable to balance the stooping propensity by throwing the stress on fresh muscles. With or without it, nine tenths of women from eighteen years old upward will need another simple support to relieve the muscles of the trunk below the waist. It matters little what causes this feebleness, whether too hard work, the weight of skirts, or degeneration of the muscular fibre from want of exercise and lack of fresh air. Its relief is imperative to preserve bloom and life of any kind worth calling life. If any girl or woman can not dance, run up stairs, take long walks, or stand about the house-work, no matter how slight the fatigue, support must be provided. Women wear corsets, and say they can not exist without them, when the demand for aid of the relaxed muscles of the hips and back, though far more imperative, is neglected. The means are very simple: a bandage of linen toweling, soft and cool, buckled, tied, or pinned, as tight as will be comfortable, and so arranged as to relieve every muscle that feels fatigue. This is worth all the manufactured appliances in the market, and its prompt use averts a hundred distressing consequences. At the first approach of debility these girdles should be worn, as they have been from ancient times among Greek and Jewish women. It is not sure that their office of prevention is not more essential than that of cure. Tight corsets are an abomination, for they interfere with flexibility, and so with that constant exercise of the trunk muscles which alone can keep them in tone—keep them from degeneration and atrophy. As to the muscles of the back and abdomen affected by the girdle, a degree of support just sufficient to encourage them to their work, and prevent their giving it up in fatigue and despair, will exercise and strengthen them. A bandage tighter than is needed for this will do harm, not only by keeping the muscles idle, and so weakening them, but by compressing the abdominal viscera, and thus producing numerous evils.

There is a game children play called “wring the towel,” in which two clasp hands and whirl their arms over their heads without losing hold, that every woman ought to practice to keep her muscles flexible. Hardly any exercise could be devised which would give play to so many muscles at once. A woman ought to be as lithe from head to heel as a willow wand, not for the sake of beauty only, but for the varied duties and functions she must perform.

It would be an artistic feat to take Christiana through a course of baths, diet, sun-sittings, and open-air walks, to show her to herself. The oleander glow on firm cheeks, the eye of light, the tread of Diana, the buoyancy of body that fosters buoyancy of mind and spirits, would please her with herself.

How dexterously Nature inserts the reward of beauty before the self-denials needed to gain health! A thoroughly healthy woman never is unbeautiful. She is full of life, and vivacity shines in her face and manner, while her magnetism attracts every creature who comes within its influence.

CHAPTER X.

The Bonniest Kate in Christendom.—A Word to Mothers and Aunts.—Different Vanities.—The Sorrows of Ugly Women.—Recipes of an Ancient Beauty.—Sand Wash.—Color for the Nails.—Embrocation for the Hands.—Soap to Bleach the Arms.—Freckle Lotions.—Artistic Enthusiasm at the Toilet.

Was the last chapter too much of a sermon on Christiana’s breakfast? You think so, Kate, who are longing to learn some art that may make you the bonniest Kate in Christendom. You say your hands are rough and unsightly, your hair grows where you do not want it, and is none too thick where it ought to be. Your eyebrows are bushy—a most unfeminine trait, that makes you look fierce as a lamb with mustaches. You don’t seem lovely to yourself, and this consciousness makes you stiff and shy in your manner. Somebody is to blame for this state of things. Either your mother, or your aunt, or the lady principal of the school where you studied, ought to have taken you in hand before you were fourteen, and showed you the remedies for these defects that were to affect your spirits and comfort in after-life. A girl should be taught to take care of her skin and hair just as she is to hold her dress out of the dust, and not to crumple her sash when she sits down. One thing will not make her vain more than another. There are many vanities to be found in women’s character. One is vain of knowing three languages, one of her Sunday-school devotion, another of her pattern temper, and one of her pretty face. Of all these errors, the last is most endurable. Every attraction filched from a girl by neglect or design is so much stolen from her dowry that never can be replaced.

Victor Hugo says that he who would know suffering should learn the sorrows of women. Let him say of ugly women, and he will touch the depth of bitterness. What tears the plain ones shed on silent pillows, shrinking even from the pale, beautiful moonshine that contrasts so fatally with their homeliness. They would give years of life to win one of beauty. This regret is natural, irresistible, and not to be forbidden. Better let the grief have its way till the busy period of life takes a woman’s thoughts off herself, and she forgets to care whether she is beautiful or not. Dam up the sluices of any sorrow, and it deepens and grows wider. Is this treating a peculiarly feminine regret over-tenderly? This is written in remembrance of a girl who thought herself so homely that she absolutely prayed that she might die and go to be perfect in heaven. More than one girl makes such a wish this night before small mirrors in cottage or mansion chambers, with no eye but her own to scan her hopeless features. Why doesn’t some one open a school of fine arts, literally des beaux-arts, and make a greater success than Worth, by improving wearers instead of costumes?

Till that time comes, let us make the best of present resources, and consider these recipes, unearthed from an ancient book-shelf belonging to a maiden lady who was once, if tradition may be credited, a beauty of no mean order. There is one thing to console us, Kate: you and I will never have to cry for our lost beauty. Your hands are to be pitied, for soft, sensitive fingers are what a woman can least afford to lose. They are needed to nurse sick folks, and do quick sewing, and handle children with. So we are glad to learn something of this kind.

To soften the hands, fill a wash-basin half full of fine white sand and soap-suds as hot as can be borne. Wash the hands in this five minutes at a time, brushing and rubbing them in the sand. The best is flint sand, or the white powdered quartz sold for filters. It may be used repeatedly by pouring the water away after each washing, and adding fresh to keep it from blowing about. Rinse in warm lather of fine soap, and after drying rub them in dry bran or corn meal. Dust them, and finish with rubbing cold cream well into the skin. This effectually removes the roughness caused by house-work, and should be used every day, first removing ink or vegetable stains with acid.

Always rub the spot with cold cream or oil after using acid on the fingers. The cream supplies the place of the natural oil of the skin, which the acid removes with the stain.

To give a fine color to the nails, the hands and fingers must be well lathered and washed with scented soap; then the nails must be rubbed with equal parts of cinnabar and emery, followed by oil of bitter almonds. To take white specks from the nails, melt equal parts of pitch and turpentine in a small cup; add to it vinegar and powdered sulphur. Rub this on the nails, and the specks will soon disappear. Pitch and myrrh melted together may be used with the same results.

An embrocation for whitening and softening the hands and arms, which dates far back, possibly to King James’s times, is made from myrrh, one ounce; honey, four ounces; yellow wax, two ounces; rose-water, six ounces. Mix the whole in one well-blended mass for use, melting the wax, rose-water, and honey together in a dish over boiling water, and adding the myrrh while hot. Rub this thickly over the skin before going to bed. It is good for chapped surfaces, and would make an excellent mask for the face.

To improve the skin of the hands and arms, the following old English recipe is given, the principle of which is now revived in different cosmetic combinations. Take two ounces of fine hard soap—old Windsor or almond soap—and dissolve it in two ounces of lemon juice. Add one ounce of the oil of bitter almonds, and as much oil of tartar. Mix the whole, and stir well till it is like soap, and use it to wash the hands. This contains the most powerful agents which can safely be applied to the skin, and it should not be used on scratches or chapped hands. For the latter a delicate ointment is made from three ounces of oil of sweet almonds, an ounce of spermaceti, and half an ounce of rice flour. Melt these over a slow fire, keep stirring till cold, and add a few drops of rose-oil. This makes a good color for the lips by mixing a little alkanet powder with it, and may be used to tinge the finger-tips. It is at least harmless.

Oil of almonds, spermaceti, white wax, and white sugar-candy, in equal parts, melted together, form a good white salve for the lips and cheeks in cold weather. A fine cold cream, much pleasanter to use than the mixtures of lard and tallow commonly sold under that name, is thus made:

Melt together two ounces of oil of almonds and one drachm each of white wax and spermaceti; while warm add two ounces of rose-water, and orange-flower water half an ounce. Nothing better than this will be found in the range of toilet salves.

A wash “for removing tan, freckles, blotches, and pimples,” as the high-sounding preface assures us, is made from two gallons of strong soap-suds, to which are added one pint of alcohol and a quarter of a pound of rosemary. Apply with a linen rag. This is better when kept in a close jar overnight.

Freckle lotion, for the cure of freckles, tan, or sunburned face and hands—something which I would prefer to the rosemary wash before given, is thus made: Take half a pound of clear ox gall, half a drachm each of camphor and burned alum, one drachm of borax, two ounces of rock-salt, and the same of rock-candy. This should be mixed and shaken well several times a day for three weeks, until the gall becomes transparent; then strain it very carefully through filtering-paper, which may be had of the druggists. Apply to the face during the day, and wash it off at night.

Now, Kate, do you see your way clear to the use and benefit of these mixtures? All these articles are to be found at any large druggist’s, or, if not, he will tell you where to find them. The rosemary and honey may be found in that still fragrant store-room of your aunt’s, in the country, unless she has taken to writing very poor serial articles, and let the herb garden and the bees run out. To save trouble, take the recipes and have them made up at once by the druggist, who understands such things; but it is pleasant to dabble in washes and lotions one’s self, like the Vicar of Wakefield’s young ladies. Then have you patience to persevere in their use? For making one’s self beautiful is a work of time and perseverance as much as being an artist, or a student, or a Christian. I wish I were with you, and could keep you up to your preparations, brush your eyebrows, trim your eyelashes, and do the dozen different offices of sympathy and womanly kindness. I should feel that I was the artist putting the touches on something more valuable than any statue ever moulded. Can you feel so yourself? For if you can once get hold of that artistic impulse, you have the secret of all these toilet interferences.

CHAPTER XI.

A Dark Potion.—Olive-oil and Tar for the Face.—Olive-tar for Inhalation.—Carbolic Lotion for Pimples.—Cure for Musquito Bites.—Pale Blondes.—A French Marquise.—Deepening Colors by Sunlight.—Seductive Cosmetics.—Nose-machine.—Finger Thimbles.

Neither distilled waters perfumed like May, nor embrocation smoother than velvet, are this time to be offered you. The compound in its ugliness is more like a witch’s potion, and the odor is generally liked by those only who are used to it. But its merits are equal to its ugliness—nay, so firmly am I persuaded of its effectiveness that before sundown I doubt not its virtues will be in active test within this household. Sea winds will roughen the face, and miscellaneous food deteriorate the softest skins. There are wrinkles, too, showing their first faint daring on the brow before the glass—wrinkles which had no business there for ten years to come, at any rate. “What hand shall soothe” their trace away?

It is a hunter’s prescription that comes in use. You will hear of it along the Saranac, or up in the Franconia region, where the pines and spruces yield fresh resins for its making. It is popular there for its efficacy in keeping the black-flies and musquitoes away; yet even hunters bear witness to its excellence in leaving the skin fair and innocent. Thus runs the formula, simple enough, in all conscience, yet how few will have the boldness to try it: Mix one spoonful of the best tar in a pint of pure olive or almond-oil, by heating the two together in a tin cup set in boiling water. Stir till completely mixed and smooth, putting in more oil if the compound is too thick to run easily. Rub this on the face when going to bed, and lay patches of soft old cloth on the cheeks and forehead to keep the tar from rubbing off. The bed-linen must be protected by old sheets folded and thrown over the pillows. The odor, when mixed with oil, is not strong enough to be unpleasant—some people fancy its suggestion of aromatic pine breath—and the black, unpleasant mask washes off easily with warm water and soap. The skin comes out, after several applications, soft, moist, and tinted like a baby’s. Certainly this wood ointment is preferable to the household remedy for coarse skins of wetting in buttermilk. Further, it effaces incipient wrinkles by softening and refining the skin. The French have long used turpentine to efface the marks of age, but the olive-tar is pleasanter. A pint of best olive-oil costs about forty cents at the grocer’s; for the tar apply to the druggist, who keeps it on hand for inhaling. A spoonful of the mixture put in the water vase of a stove gives a faint pine odor to the air of a room, which is very soothing to weak lungs. Physicians often recommend it.

What is to be done with the malignant little red pimples that crop out annoyingly at the close of warm weather? The cause is very plain. When cool days check the perspiration, the system must send out matter by some other outlet before it can adjust itself to the new state of things. Nothing is better for the irritable face than bathing with a dilution of carbolic acid—one teaspoonful of the common acid to a pint of rose-water. The acid, as usually sold in solution, is about one half the strength of really pure acid, which is very hard to find. The recipe given above was furnished by a regular physician, and was used on a baby, to soothe eruptions caused by heat, with the happiest results. Care must be taken not to let the wash get into the eyes, as it certainly will smart, though it may not be strong enough to do further harm. No more purifying, healing lotion is known to medical skill, and its work is speedy. Poor baby was not beautiful with his face of unaccustomed spots and blotches, when the laving with the fluid began at night, but next morning they were hardly visible. I commend this again to mothers as a specific against those irritations with which children suffer. For soothing musquito bites alone it is worth all the camphor, soda washes, and hartshorn that ever were tried.

There is a word of comfort to-day for those most hopeless cases of unloveliness, tow-colored blondes. Light hair of the faintest shade, without a tinge of gold or auburn, is now fancied abroad. Chignons of pale hair, dressed in abundant frizzes, command nearly as high a price as those pure blondes dorées which have been worth so many times their weight in gold. Ladies of fashion in France dye their hair, or rather bleach it, to this colorless state; and the effect is very piquant with dark eyes and complexion. At the fêtes in Paris recently a marchioness of daring taste attracted general admiration by her pale tresses, relieved by profuse black velvet trimmings. Indeed, the only wear for très blondes is black, even if it is only black alpaca, with transparent ruches at the neck and wrists. Let such not fear to expose themselves to the fiercest sun to gain a shade or two of color in the face. If the fine-grained skin which accompanies such hair take on a pale, even brown, so much the better for artistic effect. Dark eyes will give brilliancy to the dullest face; and dark they must be, if the harmless crayon can make them so by skillful shading about the light lashes. If ever art is a boon, it is when called in to change the sickly whiteness of too blonde brows and lashes. We can hardly expect that girls will carry their zeal for coloring so far as to feed for months on the meal from sorghum seed, which has the powerful effect of deepening the tint of the entire flesh—a phenomenon as true as strange; but we must hope that they will live and work in the rays of that great beautifier, the sun, which brings out and perfects all undeveloped tones in Nature’s painting. Pale eyes darken in exercise out-of-doors, and pasty skins grow prismatic like mother-of-pearl, in that wonderful way which fascinated Monsieur Taine when he beheld the miraculous brows and shoulders of English ladies. The idea did not seem to suggest itself to the critical Frenchman, but it will to every woman, that these charms were not wholly due to Nature. It is bewildering to read the announcements of toilet preparations under seductive names—rosaline, blanc de perle, rose-leaf powder, magnolia, velvetine, eau romaine d’or, and the rest. Think of the potent chemistry which waits outside our windows untried! Among the list of “eyebrow pencils,” “nail polishes,” and lip salves, a foreign paper brings to notice one invention which might be of use—a nose-machine, which, we are told, so directs the soft cartilage that an ill-formed nose is quickly shaped to perfection. No surgeon will deny that this is possible to a great degree. That it would be a boon nobody can doubt, seeing how many unfortunates walk the world whose noses have every appearance of having been sat upon, or made acquainted with the nether millstone. Long thimbles reaching to the second joint for shaping fingers are a new device, though something of the kind was used by very particular beauties fifty years ago. The only thing women would not do to increase their comeliness is to put themselves on the rack, unless indeed it were to live healthily.

CHAPTER XII.

Removal of Superfluous Hair.—Effects of High Living.—Work of Typhoid Fever.—Roman Tweezers.—Lola Montez’s Recipes.—Paste of Wood-ashes.—Bleaching Arms with Chloride.—Cautions about Depilatories.—Public Baths.—Improving Complexions by the Sulphur Vapor-bath.—How Arabian Women Perfume Themselves.—Profuse Hair, Sign of Nature’s Bounty.

A correspondent wishes to know what will remove superfluous hair, adding that she is annoyed with such a growth of it on her face that she is the remark of her friends. These unfortunate cases are the result of morbid constitution, freaks of nature which are to be combated as one would eradicate leprosy or scrofula. The extreme growth of hair where it should not be comes from gross living, or is inherited by young persons from those whose blood was made of too rich materials. Living for two or three generations on overlarded meats, plenty of pastry, salt meats, ham, and fish, with good old pickles from brine—in short, what would be called high living among middle-class people—is pretty sure to leave its marks on lip and brow. Sometimes typhoid fever steps in and arrests the degeneration by a painful and searching process, which, as it were, burns out the vile particles, and, if the patient’s strength endure, leaves her almost with a new body. The red, scaly skin peels off, and leaves a soft, fresh cuticle, pink as a child’s; the dry hair comes out, and a fine, often curling suit succeeds it, while moles and feminine mustaches disappear and leave no sign. But this fortunate end is not secured to order, and there are preferable ways of renewing the habit of body.

For immediate removal of the afflicting shadows which mar a feminine face there are many methods. The Romans used tweezers, regularly as we do nail-brushes, to pull out stray hairs; and Lola Montez speaks of seeing victims of a modern day sitting for hours before the mirror painfully pulling out the hairs on their faces. But this often makes the matter worse; for if the hairs are broken off, and not pulled up by the roots they are sure to grow coarser than before. Often one hair pulled out sends two or three to grow in its place. A paste of fine wood-ashes left to dry on the skin is said to eat off hairs, and is probably as safe as any remedy. The authority on feminine matters quoted above recommends very highly a plaster which pulls the hairs out by the roots. Spread equal parts of galbanum and pitch plaster on a piece of thin leather, and apply to the place desired; let it remain three minutes, and pull off suddenly, when it brings the hairs with it, and they are said not to grow again. This will probably bring the tears into the eyes of any one who tries it; but the courage of damsels desiring a smooth face is not to be damped by such trifles as an instant’s pain. If the plaster were left on more than three minutes, it would be apt to bring the skin with it in coming off. It is better to use daily a paste of ashes or caustic soda, left on as long as it can be borne, washing with vinegar to take out the alkali, and rubbing on sweet-oil to soften the skin, which is left very hard by these applications. Applied day after day, it would not fail to kill the hair in a month, when it would dry and rub off. This may be used on the arms, which might be whitened and cleared of hair together by bathing them in a hot solution of chloride of lime as strong as that used for bleaching cotton, say two table-spoonfuls to a quart of water. Bathe the arms daily in this, as hot as can be borne, for not over two minutes, washing afterward in vinegar and water, and rubbing with almond or olive-oil. This should be done in a warm room before an open window to avoid breathing the fumes of the chloride, which are both unpleasant and noxious. Strong soft-soap left to dry on the arms would in time eat away any hair. But the trouble is that these strong agents eat away the skin almost as soon as they do the hair, and nice care must be used to prevent dangerous results. If the blood should be in bad order, though not suspected by any one, least of all by the person interested, caustic of any sort might eat a hole in the flesh that would fester, and be a long time healing. I saw a frightful sore that a lady made on her neck, trying to remove a mole with lunar caustic, and should advise every one to be careful how they run such painful risks. It is not wise to endure pain heroically, thinking to have the matter over and done with at once. Better try the applications many times, leaving them to do their work gradually and surely.

To lay the foundation of true beauty, the system should be purified within as well as without. Nothing is of so much value in this respect as the vapor-bath. In all our large cities public establishments exist for taking these baths, and their virtues are well appreciated by those who once try them. At the largest bathing-houses in New York ladies attend regularly for the sole object of improving their complexion. Perhaps the most successful form administered is the sulphur vapor-bath, which works wonders for neuralgia. It purifies and searches the blood, and I have seen a patient who had lost one of the loveliest complexions in the world, as she thought forever, come out of her bath day after day visibly whitened at each trial. For ladies past youth nothing restores such softness and child-like freshness to the cheek or such suppleness to the figure. Of course these baths can only be taken at places for the purpose, where chemical means are not wanting. I only mention them to urge all ladies who have the chance of trying them not to fail of doing so, both for pleasure and benefit.

The vapor-bath, pure and simple, has stood for some time among household remedies for various ills, and is given by seating the undressed patient on a straw or flag chair over a saucer in which is a little lighted alcohol, and wrapping chair, patient, and all in large blankets. After a few minutes the perspiration streams as if he were in a caldron of steam, and may be kept up any length of time. Fifteen minutes are enough. A tepid bath should follow, if one is not chilled by it, and after that either a good sleep or exercise enough to keep one in a glow. Impurities are discharged from the system in this way which else might occasion fever. The hair, skin, and nails are insensibly renewed and refined by it. There is not the least danger of taking cold if the precautions are taken of rubbing dry, dressing quickly and warmly, and keeping the blood at its proper heat by work or fire—in short, by doing just those things which ought to be done should one never go near a vapor-bath.

Arabian women have a similar method of perfuming their bodies by sitting over coals on which are cast handfuls of myrrh and spices. The heat opens the pores, which receive the fumes, till the skin is impregnated with the odor, and the women come out smelling like a censer of incense. Twice a week is often enough for the vapor-bath; as for the fumigation, some creature doubtless will be wild enough to try the experiment once, which will be sufficient for a lifetime. If she do, she will be very glad to know that ammonia bathing will destroy most traces of her adventurous caprice.

A profusion of hair, however, is a sign of nature’s liberality, and this growth is found in connection with a strength and generosity of constitution that is capable of the best things when duly refined. South Americans, with their supple bodies overflowing with vitality, have splendid tresses, and so have the Spaniards and Italians. Such people are quick and lasting in the dance, own deep tuneful voices, move with vigor and ease, and have a luxuriance of blood and spirits, which is too precious to restrain or lose. Fasting, denial of pleasant food and plenty of it, till one is worn to an anchorite, may do for religious penance, but does not reach physical ends so well as moderate and satisfying indulgence. If any poor girl think, from reading this paper, that she ought to starve and waste herself by sweating because she has a pair of mustaches and a coat of hair on her arms, she is vastly mistaken. If she want to know what she may eat, let her study Professor Blot’s cookery-book. Whatever is there she may eat, as it is there, assured that all the delightful French seasoning will not do her blood half the injury of a season’s course of pies made after good Yankee fashion—the crust half lard and half old butter, the filling strong with spice or drenched with essence, as the case may be.

CHAPTER XIII.

Madame Celnart’s Works of the Toilet.—Literature of Beauty.—Cares of the Toilet.—Arts of Coiffure and Lacing.—How to Hold a Needle Gracefully.—Iris Powder for Tresses.—Arts of Italian Women.—Depilatory used in Harems.—Spirit of Pyrêtre.—Herbs used by Greek Women.—Mexican Pomade.—Dusky Perfumed Marbles.—Lost Perfumes.—Sultanas’ Lotion.—Brilliant Paste for Neck and Arms.—Baking Enamel.

If ever a woman deserved a seat in the French Academy for the value of her literary labors to her kind, it was Madame Celnart.

The works of this lively author on manners, dress, cosmetics, and kindred topics no less interesting to her sex, are found in eight small octavos in their native French. The lady was an industrious and brilliant writer on themes of the toilet, the household, and deportment, on which Mrs. Farrar, author of The Young Lady’s Friend, of our mothers’ time, and Mrs. Beeton, the editor of The Englishwoman’s Magazine, in our day, have succeeded her with much adornment but hardly equal scope. Madame Celnart talks—one can hardly imagine her holding a pen—like a Parisian, with empressement, with drollery, precision, and inimitable sprightliness. Her lectures sound like those of a gentle old beauty, secure in the charm of her finished manner against the loss of her earlier fascinations, telling the secrets of her age to a younger generation, with half a smile at their readiness to seize these arts, and seriously pointing out the most graceful or the most modest way of doing things, with the concern of one who is conscious that grace and prudence do not come to all her sex by nature. Imagine the arch gentleness with which she opens her work on the toilet in such easy, sparkling guise as this:

“Je viens de feuilleter les arts de plaire, les livres de beauté, et autres évangiles des courtisane,” which may be freely translated, “I come to speak of the arts of pleasing, the literature of beauty, and other evangels of coquetry.” She has a well-bred curl of disdain for “une allure bourgeoise mesquine;” but with the reverence of a true Frenchwoman, whose creed is her mirror, she pronounces her work “consacré à la toilette, et la conversation de la beauté.” These duties she divides with serious precision into the “soins de la toilette,” which include cosmetic arts, and “l’art de se coiffer, lacer, et chausser.” It was indeed an art, in the time of hundred-boned corsets without clasps, to lace one’s self, and in the days of classic sandals to put on one’s shoes. She is as exact in all her details as a school-mistress, though one fancies a covert smile on her wise face as she rallies the young demoiselles who dreaded the bath—because it was so cold? Oh no; but because their modesty could not endure the baring of their person even to themselves. Such, she gravely advises, may save their “pudeur” by bathing in a peignoir. One inevitably recalls Lola Montez’s dedication of her famous Book of Beauty, “To all men and women who are not afraid of themselves,” on encountering these French demoiselles with their conventual susceptibility.

The graceful preceptress goes on with directions for sitting, for holding one’s needle, for dancing, and holding one’s petticoats out of the mud. Nobody will allow that these hints are superfluous who notices the varied awkwardness which women fall into who are habitually thoughtless on these points. Some of these nice customs may have been carried to our shores, possibly with Rochambeau’s French ladies at Newport or Salem. I remember hearing one of the fine Newburyport ladies, who answer to the description of gentlewomen still, maintain earnestly that it was most graceful to “sew with a long point”—that is, to push the needle nearly its whole length through at each stitch, instead of pulling it out, so to speak, by the nose. And she was right, as you can verify by the next sewing you take up.

In the time of Madame Celnart, fine ladies used to powder their hair with the dust of Florentine iris, which gave their love-breathing tresses the violet odor of spring. A pleasant idea; but their iris, our orris-root, must have been a trifle fresher than comes to this country. It makes us sure that the beauties of Titian’s and Guido’s times were real women, to know that they steeped their tresses in bleaching liquids and dyes, and spread their locks in the sun for hours to gain the coveted golden tinge; and the hair of the Bella Donna herself might have caught part of its enchantment from the sprinkling of violet powder that lent its waves a soul. Those immortal beauties would have canonized Lubin had he been alive with his pomades and perfumes in their time. Celnart was a courageous advocate of cosmetics, or else she was wise enough to put the worst first, for one of her earliest recipes is this depilatory, which is not at all quoted by way of recommendation. It is the Oriental Rusma, a depilatory used in harems:

Two ounces of quicklime, half an ounce of orpiment and red arsenic; boil in one pint of alkaline lye, and try with a feather to see when it is strong enough. Touch the parts to be rid of hair, and wash with cold water. When we say that orpiment and realgar are deadly poisons, and add Madame Celnart’s remark that the mixture is of “une grande causticité,” often attacking the tissue of the skin, our readers will quite agree with her that it is only to be used with “la plus grande circonspection,” or, still better, not at all. The Crème Parisienne depilatoire is harmless, and is given for what it is worth: One eighth of an ounce of rye starch, and the same of sulphate of baryta (or heavy-spar), the juice of purslane, acacia, and milk-thistle, mixed with oil.

The high-sounding Paste of Venus, devised by a Parisian cosmetic artist, who shared the mythologic fancy which prevailed years ago, was spread over the skin to soften and perfume it. Esther herself might have used it, for its conjugation of spices would delight an Oriental. It was made of fat, butter, honey, and aromatics—the more the better; but as none of our belles wish to try the anointing bodily, I spare them the list, and give instead the Esprit de pyrêtre. The pyrethrum, or Spanish pellitory, is an herb highly valued by cosmetic artists, and appears in several recipes of the French:

Powdered cinnamon, one drachm; coriander, nineteen scruples; vanilla, the same; clove, eighteen grains; cochineal, mace, and saffron, the same; simple spirit of pyrethrum, one litre (about seven eighths of a quart). Let these ingredients digest for fifteen days, and add orange-flower water, half an ounce; oil of anise, eighteen drops; citron, ditto; oils of lavender and thyme, each nine drops; ambergris, three grains. Mix the ambergris with the pyrêtre, and put the two liquids together. Filter after two days. Use as a toilet water.

No wonder French cosmetics are so highly valued, when their composition embraces such a variety of pleasing ingredients. Thyme, anise, and saffron seem homely herbs for a woman’s use, but they assisted at every toilet among the Greek women of old; and Rhodora wove the crocus (meadow-saffron) with the rose, and fennel among her jasmines, without a thought such as these things give us of sick-teas and home-made dyes. Why should herbs of such excellent renown lose the poetry that belongs to them? Mingled in variety with ambergris and orange flowers, they give body to a perfume rich enough to have satisfied Cleopatra.

If this recipe is complicated, what will be said to the next, compounded by South American women, and fashionable in Paris not so very long after the time of Josephine, who may have patronized, or, indeed, introduced this souvenir of creole coquetry. Madame Celnart says of it, “Only the Tartuffes of coquetry could blame the Mexican pomade,” whose proportions indicate that the formula came straight from the perfumer’s hands, and is therefore correct. Any one who wishes to try it can reduce the measure to suit herself:

Extract of cocoa, sixty-four ounces; oil of noisette, thirty-two ounces; oil of ben, thirty-two ounces; oil of vanilla, two ounces; white balsam of Peru, one drachm; benzoin flowers, half a drachm; civet, ditto; neroli, one drachm; essence of rose, one drachm; oil of clove flowers, one ounce; citron and bergamot waters, each half a pint. Steep the vanilla in the cocoa butter eight days in a hot place; dissolve the balsam in half a glass of alcohol, with the benzoin and civet, and add the spirit of clove. Mix the essence of rose and neroli in the oils of ben and noisette, and beat the whole forcibly together in a large marble or china bowl.

Creole women spread this paste on their smooth skins, which the oil of cocoa softens and moistens, while the delightful changing odor is absorbed, till their forms are like living, dusky, but perfumed marbles. These recipes are given not so much for imitation, or to contribute to the lore of perfumers this side the water, as curiosities of national arts and feminine vanity. Where in our country would we find the ingredients of the celebrated Eau de Stahl, known to the Parisian chemists forty years ago? Its compound was as follows:

Alcohol, nine litres; rose-water, three litres; the root of Spanish pellitory, five ounces; gallingale root, three ounces; tormentil, three ounces; balsam of Peru, three ounces; cinnamon, five drachms; rue, one ounce; ratania, eight ounces. Powder the whole, and put in alcohol; shake well, and leave to macerate six days. Pour off, and let it stand twenty-four hours to clear, after which add essential oil of mint, one and a half drachms; powdered cochineal, four drachms. Leave to infuse anew three days; filter through filtering-paper, and decant. Use for a tooth-wash, for washing the face, or for baths.

Peruvian powder was a standard dentifrice of the same date. It is made of white sugar, half a drachm; cream of tartar, one drachm; magnesia, ditto; cinnamon, six grains; mace, two grains; sulphate of quinine, three grains; carmine, five grains. Powder and mix carefully, adding four drops of the oils of rose and mint.

The following cosmetic, called the Serkis du Sérail, is said to be a favorite lotion used by the Sultanas, for whom it is imported from Achaia—though this sounds more like one of those pleasant fictions which perfumers delight to invent concerning their oils and pomades than any thing we are obliged to believe. This may be said in favor of the assertion—it is such a mixture of starch and oils as no one but an odalisque could endure to use. It is made of sweet-almond paste, ten livres; rye and potato starch, each six livres; oil of jasmine, eight ounces; the same of oil of orange flowers and of roses; black balsam of Peru, six ounces; essence of rose and of cinnamon, each sixty grains. Mix the powders and essences separately in earthen vessels, then add the powder to the liquid little by little, bruise well together, and strain through muslin.

An elegant preparation for whitening the face and neck is made of terebinth of Mecca, three grains; oil of sweet almonds, four ounces; spermaceti, two drachms; flour of zinc, one drachm; white wax, two drachms; rose-water, six drachms. Mix in a water-bath, and melt together. The harmless mineral white is fixed in the pomade, or what we would call cold cream, and is applied with the greatest ease and effect. It must be to some preparation of this subtle sort that the lustrous whiteness of certain much-admired fashionable complexions is due. It is a cheap enamel, without the supposed necessity of baking, which, by the way, is such a blunder that I wonder people of sense persist in speaking of it as if it could be a fact.

CHAPTER XIV.

The Last of the Rose.—Weighing in the Balances.—To Love and to be Loved.—The Enigma of Love.—Its Power over the Lot of Men.—Inspiration in the Looks.—The Land of Spring.—The Duchess of Devonshire.—Women at and after Thirty.—Training of Emotion.—Warming the Voice.—Crow’s-feet at the Opera.—Bohemian Arsenic Waters.—Recipe from Madame Vestris.—Milk of Roses.—Sweet-oils.—Opera-dancers’ Prescription for Restoring Suppleness.

For any woman, maid or matron, past youth, who hears the leaves begin to drop, and sees the roses curl in the warm summer of her life, this chapter is written. It is well that with the decay of bloom and outward charm there should be a lessening of feeling, an amiable indifference to the homage that youth covets eagerly. The woman of—who dares fill in the age?—the woman who finds the faint lines on her cheek and the pallor creeping to her lip should have learned and tasted many things in her life—so many that she can appraise the value of all, and resign them contentedly, with a little sigh, not for what they were, but for what they were not.

She should have loved, and, if possible, have won love in return, though that is less matter. The wisdom, the blessedness, come through loving, not through being loved.

It is well if she can accept the complement of her affection, and find out of what mutable elements it is made: its fervor and forgetfulness; its devotion, often eclipsed and as often surprising with its fresh strength—weak where we trust it most, and standing proof where we surely expect it to fail.

Such is the love of man. It is a riddle, whose learning has cost gray hairs on tender temples, the roses from many cheeks.

It is the tradition that love makes or mars a woman’s life; but I have yet to learn that it does not exert an equal though silent power over the lot of men. Be that as it may, a woman in love is far more beautiful than one out of it. And this is true if the love last to threescore.

Let women, if they would remain charming, by all means keep their hold on love, their faith in romance. The power of feeling gives vitality and interest to faces long after their first flush has passed. Speaking as matter of fact, this is the case, for emotion has a livelier power than the sun has over the blood, and the miracle of love in making a plain girl pretty is explained by the stimulating effects of happiness on the circulation. If you would preserve inspiration in your looks, beware how you repress emotion. Cultivate, not the signs of it, but emotion itself, for the two things are very distinct. Suffer yourself to be touched and swayed by noble music and passion. To do this, place yourself often under the best influences within reach. There may be pathos enough in the rendering of a poor little girl’s song at the piano to stir tenderly chords of feeling that were growing dull for want of use. The rose of morning, the perfume of spring, have rapt many a middle-aged woman away to divine regions of fancy, from which she came back with their dewy freshness and smell lingering about her. Youth has its daylong reveries while its hands are at work. We older ones need to reserve with jealous care our hours of solitude, in which the springs fill up.

The faces of old beauties have no charm beyond that of feeling. Look at the women who were reputed the belles of our large cities twenty years ago. They may be well preserved; but in most cases they are mere masks in discolored wax. The pearly teeth, the small Grecian features, the soft, fine hair and regular eyes are left, but the brow has learned neither to weep nor smile, the lips are composed, and might be mute for all the expression that replaces their lost crimson. One could adore the wasted beauty of the Duchess of Devonshire, “worn by the agitations of a brilliant and romantic life,” for the sake of the fire and kindness that lit even its death-pillow; and the Josephine of Malmaison, with eyes always eloquent of tears, wins more devotion than the empress at Saint Cloud, confessed the loveliest woman of France. Let no woman fall into the mistake of preserving her beauty by refraining from emotion, for all she can keep by such costly pains will be the coffin-like shapeliness of flowers preserved in sand.

Laugh, weep, rejoice, or suffer as life provides. Only feel something natural, worthy and vivid enough not to leave your face a blank.

There is a time between twenty-five and thirty-five when the struggle of life, mean or lofty as it may be, oppresses women sorely. Fret and care write crossing script on their faces, which grow yellow and pinched till they despair of comeliness. This is when they are learning to live. Ten years or so make the lesson easy, and it is one of the thankfulest things in the world to see such faces going back to the blossom and sunny sweetness of their spring. Many a woman is handsomer at thirty-nine than she was at thirty. Nature responds wonderfully to the reliefs afforded her. The only counsel is to let Nature go free. Do not think, because trial has bent spirit and frame together, that they should stay so a moment after the heavy hand is off. If you feel like singing, sing, not humming low, but joyful and clear as the larks, that would carol just as gayly at ninety, if larks lived so long, as the first summer they left their nests. The worst of English and American systems of manners is the constant repression they demand. It impairs even the physical powers, so that in training a singer the first thing great artists do is to teach her to feel, in order, as they say, to “warm up” the voice and give it fullness. Women need to cultivate pleasure and amusement far more after they are thirty than before it, I mean romantic pleasures, such as come from exquisite colors and sceneries in nature or their homes, from poetry and the loveliest music. They are twice as impressible then as they are in youth, if they know how to get hold of the right notes. They leave themselves to fall out of tune, and forget to respond.

Yet, as a woman does not love to carry her thinned tresses and crow’s-feet into the glare of the opera, or to talk poetry when rheumatism twinges her middle finger, the craft of the toilet comes in most gratefully. The freshness of the skin is prolonged by a simple secret, the tepid bath in which bran is stirred, followed by long friction, till the flesh fairly shines. This keeps the blood at the surface, and has its effect in warding off wrinkles. Bohemian countesses over thirty may go to arsenic springs, as they were wont to do, for the benefit of their complexions; but the home bath-room is more efficacious than even the minute doses of quicksilver with which the ladies of George the First’s court used to poison themselves—a primitive way of getting at the virtues of blue-pill.

The celebrated Madame Vestris slept with her face covered by a paste which gave firmness to a loose skin and prevented wrinkles. It was a recipe which the Spanish ladies are fond of using, which requires the whites of four eggs boiled in rose-water, to which is added half an ounce of alum, and as much oil of sweet almonds, the whole beaten to a paste.

A favorite cosmetic of the time of Charles II. was the milk of roses, said to give a fair and youthful appearance to faded cheeks. It was made by boiling gum-benzoin in the spirits of wine till it formed a rich tincture, fifteen drops of which in a glass of water made a fragrant milk, in which the face and arms were bathed, leaving the lotion to dry on. It obliterates wrinkles as far as any thing can besides enamel.

To restore suppleness to the joints, the Oriental practice may be revived of anointing the body with oil. The best sweet-oil or oil of almonds is used for this purpose, slightly perfumed with attar of roses or oil of violets. The joints of the knees, shoulders, and fingers are to be oiled daily, and the ointment well rubbed into the skin, till it leaves no gloss. The muscles of the back feel a sensible relief from this treatment, especially when strained with work or with carrying children. The anointing should follow the bath, when the two are taken together. It is a pity this custom has ever fallen into disuse among our people, who need it quite as much as the sensuous Orientals.

Opera-dancers in Europe use an ointment which is thus given by Lola Montez: The fat of deer or stag, eight ounces; olive-oil, six ounces; virgin wax, three ounces; white brandy, half a pint; musk, one grain; rose-water, four ounces. The fat, oil, and wax are melted together, and the rose-water stirred into the brandy, after which all are beaten together. It is used to give suppleness to the limbs in dancing, and relieves the stiffness ensuing on violent exercise. Ambergris would suit modern taste better than musk in preparing this.

CHAPTER XV.

The Fearful Malady of which no one Dies.—Esprit Odontalgique.—Gray Pastilles.—Important to Smokers.—Mouth Perfumes.—Care of the Breath.—Directions for Bathing.—Perfumes for the Bath.—Bazin’s Pâte.—Quality of Soaps.—Bathing and Anointing the Feet.—Nicety of Stockings.—Delicate Shoe Linings.—Feet of Pauline Bonaparte.

Among the recipes, more or less valuable, which come to light in old collections, one for the toothache, by Boerhaave, is too useful to be lost. Even beauties have the toothache sometimes, especially after going home from the Academy of Music on a snowy night with a tulle scarf folded about their heads, or after sitting with their backs to the window in a half-warmed parlor during a ceremonious call. Use before beauty, mademoiselles; and with no more excuse is proffered the Esprit Odontalgique, which should be kept in the dressing-room, ready for the slightest signs of that most terrible malady, from which nobody dies.

Alcohol of thirty-three degrees, one ounce; camphor, four grains; opium in powder, twenty grains; oil of cloves, eighty drops. The efficacy of this lotion will be seen at a glance, and no other authority for its use is needed than that of the learned and excellent physician who gave it its name.

Very properly follow the gray pastilles for purifying the breath. They do so, not by disguising it, but by reaching the root of the difficulty, arresting decay in the teeth, and neutralizing acidity of the stomach. The mixture is very simple: Chlorate of lime, seven drachms; vanilla sugar, three drachms; gum-arabic, five drachms—to be mixed with warm water to a stiff paste, rolled, and cut into lozenges.

Madame Celnart archly advises all good wives to let their spouses know that these lozenges entirely remove the traces of tobacco in the breath. As a good wife will hardly interfere with a favorite habit of her husband who is fond of smoking, the least any gentleman can do is to render his presence acceptable after the indulgence.

Another pastille, preferable on some accounts to the above, but owing its value to the same principle, is made from chlorate of sodium, twenty-four grains; powdered sugar, one ounce; gum-adraganth, twenty grains; perfumer’s essential oil, two drachms. Powder the chlorate in a glass mortar; put the powder in a cup, and pour in a little water; let it settle, and pour off. Repeat the process three times with fresh water, filtering what is poured off each time, and mix the gum and sugar with it, adding the perfume last.

A gargle for the mouth which combines all the virtues of Eau Angelique, and every other wash of heavenly name, is made of the chlorate of lime in powder, three drachms; distilled water, two ounces. Reduce the chlorate with a glass pestle in a glass mortar, add a third of the water, stir, and pour off, as directed before, till all is added. To this add two ounces of alcohol, in which is dissolved four drops of the volatile oil of roses and four drops of perfumer’s essential oil. Half a teaspoonful of the solution in a wine-glass of water is to be used at a time as a tooth-wash and gargle for the mouth and gums.

With the best intentions as to physical neatness, many persons are unable to make the impression of their company wholly agreeable. They may remember with advantage that rinsing the mouth with this fluid six times a day is not too much pains in order to make themselves acceptable to others. There is no surer passport to esteem than an innocent, taintless person, which wins upon one before moral virtues have time to make their way. If you think this truth is repeated too often, study the impression made by the respectable people you meet for the next month. The result will satisfy you that those who are as neat as white cats are as one to fifteen of the careless, easily satisfied sort.

Slight disorders of the system make themselves known by the sickly odor of the perspiration, quite sensible to others, though the person most interested is the last to become conscious of it. The least care, even in cold weather, for those who would make their physical as sure as their moral purity, is to bathe with hot water and soap twice a week from head to foot. Carbolic toilet soap is the best for common use, as it heals and removes all roughness and “breakings out” not of the gravest sort. Ladies whose rough complexions were a continual mortification have found them entirely cleared by the use of this soap. The slight unpleasant odor of the acid present soon disappears after washing, and it may be overcome by using a few spoonfuls of perfume in the water.

An excellent preparation for bathing is Bacheville’s Eau des Odalisques. The French recommend it highly for frictions, lotions, and baths. It is made in quantity for free use after this recipe: Two pints of alcohol, one of rose-water, half a drachm of Mexican cochineal, four ounces of soluble cream of tartar, five drachms of liquid balsam of Peru, five drachms of dry balsam of the same; vanilla, one drachm; pellitory root, one and a half ounces; storax, one and a half ounces; galanga, one ounce; root of galanga, one and a half ounces; dried orange peel, two drachms; cinnamon, essence of mint, root of Bohemian angelica, and dill seed, each one drachm. Infuse eight days, and filter. For lotions, add one spoonful of this to six of water. It is also useful for freshening the mouth, adding twenty-four drops of it to four teaspoonfuls of tepid water. For diseased gums, double the dose, and gargle with it several times a day.

The Pâte Axérasive of Bazin, the celebrated perfumer, has the distinction of being highly commended by the French Royal Academy of Medicine. It is better for toilet use than soaps which contain so much alkali. Take powder of bitter almonds, eight ounces; oil of the same, twelve ounces; savon vert of the perfumers, eight ounces; spermaceti, four ounces; soap powder, four ounces; cinnabar, two drachms; essence of rose, one drachm. Melt the soap and spermaceti with the oil in a water-bath, add the powder, and mix the whole in a marble mortar. It forms a kind of paste, which softens and whitens the skin better than any soap known.

Make toilet waters and pastes of this kind in quantity, as they improve with age. It costs about one fourth as much to prepare them as to buy the same quantity at the perfumer’s, and one has the advantage of a finer article. Do not use cheap soap for the toilet. Such is almost always made of rancid or half-putrid fat, combined with strong alkalies, which dry and crack the skin, sometimes causing dangerous sores by the poisonous matter they introduce from vile grease. Never allow such soap to touch the flesh of an infant. To do so is little better than absolute cruelty. White soaps are the safest, as they are only made of purified fat.

The feet should be washed every night and morning as regularly as the hands. It preserves their strength and elasticity, and helps to keep their shape. What person of refinement can take any pleasure in looking at her own feet presenting the common appearance of distortion by shoes too tight in the wrong place, and the dry, hardened skin of partial neglect? One’s foot is as proper an object of pride and complacency as a shapely hand. But where in a thousand would a sculptor find one that was a pleasure to contemplate, like that of the Princess Pauline Bonaparte, whose lovely foot was modeled in marble for the delight of all the world who have seen it?

As nice care should be given to feet as to hands, beginning with a bath of fifteen minutes in hot soap and water, followed by scraping with an ivory knife, and rubbing with a ball of sand-stone, which will be found most useful for a dozen toilet purposes. The nails may be left to take care of themselves, with constant bathing and well-fitting shoes, unless they have begun to grow into the flesh, when all to be done is to scrape a groove lengthwise in each corner of the nail. The whole foot should be anointed with purified olive-oil or oil of sweet almonds after such a bath. A pair of stockings should be drawn on at night to preserve the bedclothes from grease-spots. The oil will soak off the old skin, and wear away the scaly tissue about the nails, while it renders the soles as soft and pliant as those of a young child.

A daily change of stockings is as desirable for those who walk out as a fresh handkerchief every morning—but how many people consider it necessary? It may sound audacious to suggest that when laundry-work is an item, a lady would show her ingrain refinement by washing her own Balbriggan hose as truly as by stinting herself to two pair a week on account of washer-women’s bills. As for the vulgarity of wearing colored stockings “because they show dirt less,” it is to be repudiated, save in the case of children, who are quite capable of going through with a box of white stockings in a day, and looking none the cleaner for it at the end. Our bootmakers are in fault about the lining of shoes, which ought to be changeable when soiled. Soiled, indeed! When are common shoes ever clean within? Our manufacturers are the opposite of the French, whose workmen wear fresh linen aprons, and wash their hands every hour, for fear of soiling the white kid linings at which they sew. The time will come when we will find it as shocking to our ideas to wear out a pair of boots without putting in new lining as we think the habits of George the First’s time, when maids of honor went without washing their faces for a week, and people wore out their linen without the aid of a laundress. Cleanliness means health in every case, and a plea must be offered for those neglected members, that only find favor in our eyes by making themselves as diminutive as possible.

CHAPTER XVI.

“The Leaves are Full of Joy.”—Nobility of the Body.—Its Possibilities.—Brain and Heart Dependent on it.—Physical Culture Imperative in America.—Our Contempt of Health.—Easier to be Magnificent than Clean.—Distilled Water for Every Use.—Substitute for Stills.—Vapor and Sulphur Baths.—Bran Baths.—Oatmeal for the Hands.—Frequency of Baths.—Remedies for Hepatic Spots.

How lusty and delicate the young leaves grow on their stems in their nook of sunshine! What could be lovelier in its way than the three geranium leaves starting from the mould in the window-box where the sun strikes across the corner of the sill? They are so firmly poised, yet glancing; each full of green juice that the sun turns to jewel-light, with spots of darker tint where the feathered edges overlie—a subtle piece of color wrought by sun and soil for no eye to see but by chance, yet ecstatic in its delight, as if meant for the centre trefoil of an altar window. So the sun does all his work. So leaves grow by myriads in the garden and the forest. So the forces of nature bring forth every thing perfect if left free to their impulses.

There is something like the leaves in our frames, that would grow springy and strong, soft-colored and brilliant, upright and joyous, if it were suffered to. It appeals for sunshine and gayety, for abundant food and ease, for copious watering, tendance, and freedom. Give it these, and the body, under present conditions, is as far beyond its common dullness and weakness as it is below the saints in light; for heavenly bodies can not be very different from ours unless they cease to be bodies.

The mortal frame is noble enough as it is. No harp ever vibrates like it with emotion and pleasure; no star shines so fair or so wise as the face of man. God made it, and God loves it, which is the reason it wins so closely upon us, and is so dear. There is no wisdom in despising the body or its sensations. It is crudity to uphold that the mental part of us should absorb all the rest. Brain and heart are dependent on the body, and it was meant, not for the slave—as men seem never weary of preaching—but for the interpreter and companion of both.

Honor is due the body, and thanks for its pleasures, which should be enjoyed with intelligence and leisure. They are no more low or debasing than mental pursuits may be when pursued to the exclusion of all others. The sensualist is no more intolerable in the order of nature than the pedant or pretender in literature, and does little more harm in the long-run. The former ruins himself; the latter, by a false philosophy, may lead thousands astray. Give the body its due—its thirds with the mind and the soul. Neither is the better for having more than its share.

The need of physical culture grows more and more urgent in this country. Here most unlike races mix sullen and mercurial blood together in the most variable of climates. They interchange habits as well, though the only one peculiar to Americans as such is a tolerable contempt for the conditions of health—a contempt inherited through half a dozen generations. The climate is not in fault, but the people are. It is much easier in this country to be magnificent than to be clean. At any hotel there is enough of useless upholstery, as a matter of course, but a bath is an extra, often not to be had on any terms. This is the case even in the metropolis, where at least a better idea of civilization ought to prevail. For the rest, there is not much to be said for the intelligent culture of any family who have carpets before their bath-room is fitted up.

When refinement has reached a step beyond faucets and water-pipes, each house will have its distilling apparatus to provide the purest water for drinking and bathing. Nobody will any more think of drinking undistilled water than they do now of eating brown sugar when they can get white. Her Majesty the Queen of England uses nothing but distilled water for her toilet, and the luxury and softness of such a bath are so great that no one used to its indulgence will consent to forego it. A small still costs five dollars, and would provide all the water that is needed for family use. It should be kept in action all the time, and fill a close reservoir for bathing, while that for cooking and drinking should be freshly distilled each day. A simple substitute for a still is a tea-kettle, with a close cover and a gutta-percha or lead pipe fastened to the spout, leading through a pail of cold water into a jar for holding the distilled water. The steam from the boiling water goes off through the tube, condenses under the cold water, and runs off pure into the receiver. Where houses are heated by steam, I am told, they may be amply provided with distilled water by adding a pipe to one of the tubular heaters, that will carry steam into a cooler, from which pure water may run day and night.

Besides the distilled-water baths in a complete household, there should be facilities for the vapor-bath at any time. This is invaluable in colds, rheumatism, congestions, and neuralgia. The readiest substitute is the rush-bottomed chair and lighted saucer of alcohol described in a former chapter. A sulphur bath requires a shallow pan of coals with a tin water-pan above it, and an elevated seat over the whole. Sulphur is thrown on the coals, which mingles with the steam, and enters the system by the pores, which are opened by the vapor. The patient, brazier, and chair must be enveloped with a water-proof covering in the closest manner, leaving only the head exposed, so that no sulphurous vapor can possibly be breathed, as that would be suffocation at once. In regular bathing establishments the patient sits in a wooden box, having a cover and a water-proof collar which fits tight about the neck, leaving the head out. This box is filled with steam by a pipe, and the vapor impregnated with sulphur from a spoonful burning in one corner of the box, or from a generator outside with connecting tube. It is difficult, if not impossible, to administer a sulphur bath without proper and special appliances.

The bran bath, recommended before, is taken with a peck of common bran, such as is used to stuff pincushions, stirred into a tub of warm water. The rubbing of the scaly particles of the bran cleanses the skin, while the gluten in it softens and strengthens the tissues. Oatmeal is even better, as it contains a small amount of oil that is good for the skin. For susceptible persons, the tepid bran bath is better than a cold shower-bath. The friction of the loose bran calls the circulation to the surface. In France the bran is tied in a bag for the bath, but this gives only the benefit of the gluten, not that of the irritation.

The frequency of the bath should be determined, after it has been taken for a week or two, by feeling. Take the refreshment as often as the system desires it. The harm is done not so much by bathing often as by staying in the water long at a time. A hot soap-suds bath once a week is beneficial to persons with moist and oily skins. Bay-rum and camphor may be used to advantage by such persons each time after washing the face. The hot suds bath should be taken thrice a week by those who wish to remove moth patches.

One of the best ways to make the hands soft and white is to wear at night large mittens of cloth filled with wet bran or oatmeal, and tied closely at the wrist. A lady who had the finest, softest hands in the county confessed that she had a great deal of house-work to do, but kept them white by wearing bran mittens every night.

Pastes and poultices for the face owe most of their efficacy to the moisture, which dissolves the old coarse skin, and the protection they afford from the air, which allows the new skin to form tender and delicate. Oat meal paste is efficacious as any thing, though less agreeable than the pastes made with white of egg, alum, and rose-water. The alum astringes the flesh, making it firm, while the egg keeps it sufficiently soft, and the rose-water perfumes the mixture.

What are called indiscriminately moth, mask, morphew, and, by physicians, hepatic spots, are the sign of deep-seated disease of the liver. Taraxacum, the extract of dandelion root, is the standing remedy for this, and the usual prescription is a large pill four nights in a week, sometimes for months. To this may be added the free use of tomatoes, figs, mustard-seed, and all seedy fruits and vegetables, with light broiled meats, and no bread but that of coarse flour. Pastry, puddings of most sorts, and fried food of all kinds must be dispensed with by persons having a tendency to this disease. It may take six weeks, or even months, to make any visible impression on either the health or the moth patches, but success will come at last. One third of a teaspoonful of chlorate of soda in a wine-glass of water, taken in three doses, before meals, will aid the recovery by neutralizing morbid matters in the stomach. There is no sure cosmetic that will reach the moth patches. Such treatment as described, such exercise as is tempting in itself, and gay society, will restore one to conditions of health in which the extinction of these blotches is certain.

CHAPTER XVII.

The Banting System.—A Quaint Author.—Trials of Corpulency.—Result of Living on Sixpence a Day.—Indifference of Doctors.—A Wise Surgeon.—Relation of Glucose to Obesity.—Diet for Stout People.—No Starch, no Sugar.—Losing Flesh at the Rate of a Pound a Week.—“Human Beans.”—Humors of Banting’s Tract.—His Gratitude.—Honors to Dr. Harvey.—One Day with Dives, the Next with Lazarus.—Bromide of Ammonia.

Request is often made for the details of Mr. Banting’s system of reducing flesh. The popular idea of the writer, whose modest pamphlet has linked his name with the system he observed, is very like the caricature of the dry modern savant. The severe scientist who keeps his child for years without fire or clothes to demonstrate the superiority of human beings to cold, or who throws a new-born baby into a tub of water to prove that the race can swim by nature, should not be mentioned on the same page with the kindly enthusiast of the letter on corpulency.

There is no evidence in its pages that the writer ever tried authorship before. He was over sixty-six years old, when, in a burst of gratitude for his relief from the burden of too much flesh, he took up his pen to tell his fellow-creatures of help for those who suffer a like infliction. The quaintness of his pages reminds one of Izaak Walton, from his opening sentences, where he declares, “Of all the parasites that affect humanity, I do not know of, nor can I imagine, any more distressing than that of obesity”—an opinion with which all his fellow-sufferers will agree. He is fond of terming his grievance a parasite, and the name slips out with a frequency which is like the echo of objurgations hurled at his infirmity. Being called to account for it later, he meekly declares that the word is used wholly in a figurative sense. His state might have justified a stronger epithet. No parents on either side, to use his own phrase, ever showed a tendency to corpulency, but between thirty and forty he found the habit growing upon him. His physician advised violent exercise, and he took to rowing. Finding his flesh increase, he consulted “high orthodox authority (never any inferior adviser), tried sea air and bathing, took gallons of physic and liquor potassæ, always by advice, rode horseback, drank the waters of Leamington, Cheltenham, and Harrowgate”—doses enough, we should think, to have disgusted him with life forever—“lived on sixpence a day, and earned it, at least by hard labor, and used vapor-baths and shampooing,” without any help for his infirmity.

The rich gentleman found his position, the good things of this life, his houses, horses, and friends, small enjoyment, save as they lessened the increasing burden life heaped upon him. He was obedient and intelligent in using every means of relief suggested, but his doctors were of very small use to him. As he pathetically says, “When a corpulent man eats, drinks, and sleeps well, has no pain and no organic disease, the judgment of able men seems paralyzed.” His state was pitiable, and there are too many companions in distress who answer to the same picture. He could not tie his shoe, and often had to go down stairs slowly backward, to save the jar of increased weight on his ankles and knee-joints. Low living was prescribed, and he followed it so heartily that he brought his system into a low, irritable state, and broke out in boils and large carbuncles, for which he had to be treated and “toned up” in a way that brought him into heavier condition than ever.

He speaks feelingly, yet with simple dignity, of the trials which stout people endure, being crowded in cars and stages, uncomfortable in warm theatres and lecture-rooms, besides finding themselves the butt of ridicule, or, at least, the object of remark. The last caused him for many years to give up public pleasures. Many persons, as they read, will have cause to reproach themselves, for those who are considerate of every other species of human infirmity fail to recognize the real suffering of those who carry a load of flesh. A sensitive person encumbered with adipose feels keenly the glances, if not the smiles, which follow his entrance into a public vehicle. It is a test of delicacy for others to appear unconscious of his infirmity.

When Turkish baths came into fashion, Mr. Banting tried them, with the result of six pounds’ loss after taking fifty baths, which was not encouraging, though they have been of service in other like instances. In August, 1862, his case stood thus: He was nearly sixty-six years old, five feet five inches high, and weighed over two hundred pounds. He went to no excess in eating or drinking, his diet being chiefly bread, beer, milk, vegetables, and pastry. Flesh impeded his breathing, his eye-sight failed, and he lost his hearing, yet most of the doctors he went to for relief considered his trouble of no account, as one of the accompaniments of age, like wrinkles and gray hairs. The faculty are to blame for overlooking such a foe to human comfort.

Mr. William Harvey, Surgeon of the Royal Dispensary for Diseases of the Ear, was the first person wise and considerate enough to prescribe a remedy. He reasoned from M. Bernard’s accepted theory of the product of glucose as well as bile from the liver. Glucose is allied to starch and saccharine matter, and is produced in the liver by ingestion of sugar and starch. The substance is always present in excess both in diabetes and obesity, and it struck this eminent surgeon that the same dry diet which drains the excess of glucose in the former disease might be of service in the latter. Abstinence from food containing starch and sugar reduces diabetes, and accordingly he prescribed it for his patient. He was to leave off all bread, milk, butter, beer, sugar, and potatoes, besides other root vegetables, as these contain the largest amount of fat material.

Yet the diet allowed was liberal. Breakfast was four or five ounces of beef, mutton, kidney, broiled fish, and any cold meat except veal and pork; a large cup of tea without milk or sugar, a little biscuit—i. e., crackers—or an ounce of dry toast.

Dinner: five or six ounces of any fish except salmon, herring, and eels, which are too fat; any vegetables but potatoes, beets, parsnips, carrots, or turnips, green vegetables being especially good; an ounce of dry toast; the fruit of a pudding; any poultry or game; two or three glasses of good claret, sherry, or Madeira, but no champagne, port, or beer.

Tea: two or three ounces of fruit, a rusk or two, and a cup of tea without milk or sugar. Supper, at nine: three or four ounces of meat or fish, and a glass of claret. Before going to bed, if desired, a nightcap of grog without sugar was allowed, or a glass of claret or sherry.

This was comfortable compared to his former diet, which was bread and milk for breakfast, or a pint of tea, with plenty of milk and sugar, and buttered toast; dinner of meat, beer, bread, of which he ate a great deal, and pastry, of which he was fond, with fruit tart and bread and meat for supper. Yet on the liberal diet his flesh went down at the rate of more than a pound a week for thirty-five weeks.

He explains his belief that certain food is as bad for elderly people as beans are for horses, and thenceforth he calls the forbidden food “human beans.” He suffers himself to make a little mirth over the enemy that held him in durance so long. We can well believe he would “scrupulously avoid those beans, such as milk, beer, sugar, and potatoes,” after he had groaned a score of years from “that dreadful tormenting parasite on health and comfort.” He sensibly writes his opinion that “corpulence must naturally press with undue violence upon the bodily viscera, driving one part on another, and stopping the free action of all.” He calls Mr. Harvey’s system “the tram-road for obesity,” and says, “The great charm and comfort of this system is that its effects are palpable within one week of trial.”

He protests that he found not the slightest inconvenience in the probational remedy, which reduced his girth twelve inches and his weight thirty-eight pounds in thirty-five weeks. He could go up and down stairs naturally, and perform every necessary office for himself without the slightest trouble; his sight was restored, and his hearing unimpaired. In token of his gratitude, he gave the doctor, besides his fees, the sum of £50, to be distributed among the hospital patients. To prove the reality of his dedication of his letter “to the public simply and entirely from an earnest desire to benefit his fellow-creatures,” the editions were distributed gratuitously in hopes of reaching his fellow-sufferers from flesh. He was eager that they should find the relief which to him was rapturous. It must have reached some cases, for more than 58,000 copies had been issued at the date of this edition. The author was urged to sell his work, even if the proceeds were given to the poor; but with the sensitiveness of a man not used to appear in public, he says, “On reflection, I feared my motives might be mistaken.” In giving the credit of this system to Dr. Harvey, we are sure of obeying the wishes of the author, who speaks of his benefactor with extreme gratitude, and says, “He has since been told it is a remedy as old as the hills, but the application is of recent date.” He thinks any one who suffers from obesity may “prudently mount guard over the enemy, if he is not a fool to himself.” He was so far delivered from his malady as to indulge in the forbidden articles of food; but says, “I have to keep careful watch, so that if I choose to spend a day or two with Dives, I must not forget to devote the next to Lazarus.”

No medicine was given with this diet save a volatile alkali draught in the morning during the first month. This was probably the bromide of ammonia, which is of great use in reducing an over-amount of flesh.

CHAPTER XVIII.

A Letter.—Trials of a Plain Woman.—The Best Husband in the World.—Burdock Wash for the Hair.—For Children’s Hair.—Oil of Mace as a Stimulant.—To Restore Color to the Hair.—Sperm-oil a Powerful Hair Restorer.—The Cheapest Hair-Dye.—Cure for Chilblains.—Loose Shoes the Cause of Corns.—Pyroligneous Acid for Corns.—Turpentine and Carbolic Acid for Soft Corns.

Among inquiries not seldom repeated is an urgent demand for a prescription to keep the hair from coming out. The following letter will be acceptable to many readers.

“I was emphatically one of the ‘ugly girls,’ being of a very large figure, and inheriting thin hair; otherwise I suited myself well enough. But oh! the agonies I have suffered through my personal deficiencies. Now, with a happy home of my own and the best husband in the world, I can smile at the old distress. Yet it was no less real, and I can pity the ugly girls as nobody but one who has ‘been there’ can.

“My hair began coming out when I was just in my teens, and has always been the trial of my life. I have been up and down the whole scale of restoratives, with all manner of recipes volunteered by sympathizing friends. Last fall, after returning from a two months’ stay near Saratoga, where I had undergone a severe course of treatment for sundry physical ills, my hair came out frightfully, till I was almost without any, and nothing seemed to check it. A relative, an old lady, told me to use burdock-root tea. I tried it, and it worked like a charm. My hair has never grown as it does now, and it has absolutely ceased coming out—something that has not been the case for fifteen years. Something of this may be due, as far as growth is concerned, to a receipt given me by a friend a month or so ago. It is a family receipt, and something of a family secret. The ladies of the house, who use it, have magnificent hair, which they attribute to this receipt. It is a queer conglomerate, as you see: One pound of yellow-dock root, boiled in five pints of water till reduced to one pint; strain, and add an ounce of pulverized borax, half an ounce of coarse salt, three ounces of sweet-oil, a pint of New England rum, and the juice of three large red onions, perfumed at pleasure—(a quarter of an ounce of oil of lavender and ten grains of ambergris would be efficacious in overcoming the powerful scent of the ingredients).

“My little girl has magnificent hair, but it troubles me by coming out this winter. As she is only five years old, I have hesitated about putting any thing on. I wish you would some time say if it is best to doctor a child’s hair, or let nature take its course. I have learned that to shampoo the head with cold water every morning is an excellent thing, as is an occasional thorough washing with soap-suds, not rinsing the soap out completely. I have sometimes checked the fall of hair by such means. The burdock root was also used by steeping it in boiling water till a strong tea was made and used as a wash two or three times a day, then at longer intervals.”

In answer to the query in the excellent letter above, it may be said that it is always well to cure where there is disease. Simple remedies aid nature. A child’s hair is too valuable to lose. One teaspoonful of ammonia to a pint of warm water makes a wash that may be used on a child’s head daily with safety. It does not split the hair, as soap will do if left to dry in.

One of the most powerful stimulants and restoratives for the hair is the oil of mace. Those who want something to bring hair in again are advised to try it in preference to cantharides, which it is said to equal, if not to surpass, without the danger of the latter. A strong tincture for the hair is made by adding half an ounce of the oil of mace to a pint of deodorized alcohol. Pour a spoonful or two into a saucer; dip a small, stiff brush into it, and brush the hair smartly, rubbing the tincture well into the roots. On bald spots, if hair will start at all, it may be stimulated by friction with a piece of flannel till the skin looks red, and rubbing the tincture into the scalp. This process must be repeated three times a day for weeks. When the hair begins to grow, apply the tincture once a day till the growth is well established, bathing the head in cold water every morning, and briskly brushing it to bring the blood to the surface.

When the hair loses color, it may be restored by bathing the head in a weak solution of ammonia, an even teaspoonful of carbonate of ammonia to a quart of water, washing the head with a crash mitten, and brushing the hair thoroughly while wet. Bathing the head in a strong solution of rock-salt is said to restore gray hair in some cases. Pour boiling water on rock-salt in the proportion of two heaping table-spoonfuls to a quart of water, and let it stand till cold before using.

The old specific of bear’s grease for the hair is hardly found now, and one can never be sure of getting the real article; but an equally powerful application is discovered in pure sperm-oil, of the very freshest, finest quality. This forms the basis of successful hair restoratives, and will not fail of effect if used alone. It is, however, procured in proper freshness only by special importation from the north coast of Europe.

In the list of hair-dyes, one agent has long been overlooked which is found in the humblest households. It is too common and humble, indeed, to excite confidence at first; but it is said that the water in which potatoes have been boiled with the skins on forms a speedy and harmless dye for the hair and eyebrows. The parings of potatoes before cooking may be boiled by themselves, and the water strained off for use. To apply it, the shoulders should be covered with cloths to protect the dress, and a fine comb dipped in the water drawn through the hair, wetting it at each stroke, till the head is thoroughly soaked. Let the hair dry thoroughly before putting it up. If the result is not satisfactory the first time, repeat the wetting with a sponge, taking care not to discolor the skin of the brow and neck. Exposing the hair to the sun out-of-doors will darken and set this dye. No hesitation need be felt about trying this, for potato-water is a safe article used in the household pharmacopœia in a variety of ways. It relieves chilblains if the feet are soaked in it while the water is hot, and is said to ease rheumatic gout.

Inquiries have been made after a cure for corns. It is not always the case that they come from wearing tight shoes. I have seen troublesome ones produced by wearing a loose cloth shoe that rubbed the sides of the foot. It is best always to wear a snugly fitting shoe of light, soft leather, not so tight as to be painful, nor loose enough to allow the foot to spread. The muscles are grateful for a certain amount of compression, which helps them to do their work.

When corns are troublesome, make a shield of buckskin leather an inch or two across, with a hole cut in the centre the size of the corn; touch the exposed spot with pyroligneous acid, which will eat it away in a few applications. Besides this, a strong mixture of carbolic acid and glycerine is good—say one half as much acid as glycerine. Of course, only a very small quantity will be needed, and it must be kept out of the way, for it is a burning poison. In default of these, turpentine may be used both for corns and bunions. A weaker solution of carbolic acid will heal soft corns between the toes.

CHAPTER XIX.

A Talk about Complexions.—Delicate Lotion.—Cause of Rough Faces.—Sun Painting and Bleaching.—Court Ladies Refusing to Wash their Faces.—Experiments with Olive-tar.—Consumption and Clear Faces.—Rev. W. H. H. Murray on Olive-tar.—Porcelain Women.—Drawing Humors to the Surface.—What is to be Done for the Weak Women?

A Southern lady sends the following recipe for glycerine lotion, which is refined and pleasant as well as useful. The pain of sunburned and freckled skin, so troublesome to many of our fair readers, can be relieved, and the shining morning face of youth restored, by this application: Take one ounce of sweet almonds, or of pistachio-nuts, half a pint of elder or rose-water, and one ounce of pure glycerine; grate the nuts, put the powder in a little bag of linen, and squeeze it for several minutes in the rose-water; then add glycerine and a little perfume. It may be used by wetting the face with it two or three times a day. This is a grateful application for a parched, rough skin. It should be allowed to dry thoroughly, when, if it feel sticky or pasty, it may be washed off with warm water.

The reason why so many young women have rough faces is, they wash their faces every day but neglect to cleanse their bodies. The pores are clogged by secretions, and morbid matters in the blood break out in the only free spot, the face. The ladies of King George’s court were perfectly logical when they refused to wash their faces lest it should spoil their complexions. They seldom washed either bodies or linen, and it was dangerous to give their festering blood an outlet by clearing a place for it.

Full-blooded girls whose complexions give them trouble should not eat fat meat save in the depth of winter, nor drink milk. They may take these in after-years, if they grow thin and weak from hard work or the nursing of children. Their systems can turn the grapes and pears they ought to feed on, the fish, chicken, and lean meat, the nutty oatmeal and wheat cakes (not mushes), into flesh enough to round their elbows, and strength enough to make their walk like the figure of a dance. They should try daily bathing, or rather scrubbing with soap and hot water, followed by a cold dip, a process taking a matter of ten minutes a day, at most, if they know the meaning of dispatch. Very likely they will need a few bottles of Saratoga water or doses of salts to clear the blood, adhering religiously to a Graham diet the while, or their last state after the medicine will be worse than the first. After taking the sulphur vapor-baths they must go out-of-doors, and finish bleaching themselves in the sun. By living in it five hours a day, they may gain the lovely painted marble of the English girl’s face, who reaps all day in the harvest field.

Cosmetics sometimes play tricks with fair skins which are quite mysterious to the unlucky subject. This is the case with the tar and olive ointment named a few chapters ago. Those who find that its application brings out a fearful crop of pimples, and turns the skin yellow, should feel that the ointment has been a friend to them, in detecting a state of the blood that is any thing but safe. People of sedentary habits, who pay little attention to their health, are not aware how vitiated their blood may be for want of sunshine, good food, and exercise. Its torpid current leaves no mark of disease on the surface; humors concentrate in the vital organs, and finally appear in the form of chronic disorders. Consumption leaves the skin clear and brilliant, because the morbid matters which usually pass off through the skin are eating away the life in ulcers beneath. The tar brings them to the surface, and one application sometimes leaves a face in a sorry state. Three ladies of different families tried the recipe at the same time, with frightful results, for the reason that they were all in the state when a dose of blood purifier would have had the same effect. One lady kept on using the lotion, and her face became smooth after trying it three or four times. When people perspire freely, such unhappy effects are seldom noticed. Apropos of this, come a few lines from W. H. H. Murray, the author of the Hand-book of the Adirondacks. A lady who was puzzled by the effect of the cosmetic wrote to him about it, knowing he was familiar with its use in the mountains, and received this merry answer:

“I have had a hearty laugh over your perplexity. All I know is, the mixture was common sailors’ tar and sweet-oil, with the consistency of sirup. Our party, ladies and gentlemen both, have used it freely for years in the woods, and the ladies have always declared that it made their skin as soft as satin. Certain it is, it never caused any rash in their case.”

Delicate, fair-skinned women are the very ones on whom this cosmetic will have the effect of drawing humors to the surface. Heavens! how many of this sort there are in the world—pale, shadowy as porcelain, fragile of bone and tender of skin, about as useful as wish-bones of a Christmas chicken! They have intense souls; it is a pity they have not enough body to hold them. Is there not wit enough in the world to conjure flesh to the bones and strength to the muscles of this great army of weak women?

CHAPTER XX.

Sulphur Baths.—Bleaching Old Faces.—Experiments in Bathing.—Cautions.—Need of Public Baths.—Their Proper Prices.—Method of Giving Sulphur Vapor-baths.—Hot Baths for Hot Weather.—Russian Baths at Home.—Improvements Needed in Public Baths.—What they Should be.—What they Are.—The Russian Vapor-bath.—-After-Sensations.—Brightness and Lightness of Health.—Reverence for the Physical.—Influence of Bathing on the Nerves and Passions.—Necessity of Public Baths.

It is not a little amusing to receive requests for a way to give sulphur vapor-baths to the face alone. Somebody wants a fair complexion, and fancies it may be gained by bleaching the face like an old Leghorn bonnet in a barrel. Aside from the certainty of being choked to death by this method, there is no way of whitening and refining the face by applications to it alone, when the conditions of health are not regarded in other things. Carbolic acid may heal pimples, and glycerine masks soften the skin; but lovely red and white, with lips like currants, and skin like the flesh of young cranberries, can not be had unless the blood is pure. For this it is indispensable that food should be regulated, plenty of exercise and sunshine taken, and all the bodily functions kept in the best order.

The woman who thought she could take the sulphur vapor-bath at home in her own bath-room finds that her experience reads like a chapter from the Danbury News man. A bouquet of burning matches would furnish the perfume inhaled in the process, and the vapor reaching her face, left it pale and brown in spots, as if she had moth patches. That she escaped with hair only partially tinged, and any eyebrows to speak of, is due to Nature’s guardian care, which prompted the struggle for life half a minute sooner than pride was inclined to give up. The fumes lingering about the premises have induced the gravest suspicions on the part of her neighbors. She is inclined to think that, if her face would only turn brown again all over, she would forego her dreams of Parian brow and cheeks like peaches.

A sulphur vapor-bath is a matter of caution, when given by the best of hands. It is not well to take it in the damp, “breaking-up” weather of March, for the bath opens the pores, and catching cold with several grains of sulphur in one’s body is the next thing to salivation by mercury. The consequence is that one feels heavy and aching, the eyes grow weak, and teeth grumble, while latent rheumatic pains wake up to sharp reminder of one’s imprudence. When the weather is warm and settled, these baths are a luxury and medicine combined. They are most effectual purifiers of the system, searching out and removing all waste particles, to leave the skin as new and fair as a baby’s. I have seen old and darkened complexions restored by them in a way that was little short of miraculous. These baths are also of benefit in neuralgia, and deal powerfully with scrofulous affections.

The time is not far distant when every town that owns a public hall will also have its public baths. Before that time comes, physicians ought to moderate the charges for these remedial agents. Outside of our large cities, the cost of taking sulphur vapor-baths is $5 each, and they are given only in series, as prescribed by the judgment or humor of the physician. When will people learn the laws and habits of their own bodies, so that they need not be at the mercy of every specialist who chooses to make money out of their emergencies? For the benefit of outsiders it ought to be said that the charge in the best establishments of New York is not higher than $2 50 for the single bath, and a great reduction from this is common.

The essential difficulty of the sulphur vapor treatment is to keep from the face the powerful fumes, which are dangerous to breathe. For this object the bather enters a wooden box, with a cover that fits the neck. She takes a seat in the box undressed, and the cover is adjusted so that only the head is left out. Cloths or a rubber collar are closely drawn about the neck to prevent the least escape of gas, and a wet sponge is laid on the top of the head, or, what is better, a very wet towel folded turbanwise round the back of it, and over the top, thus cooling the base of the brain, the side arteries, and sensitive upper part. This compress must be frequently wet with cold water during the bath—a precaution which removes the danger of apoplectic seizures by the intense heating of the blood. Steam charged with sulphur is then let into the box by pipes, and in three minutes the perspiration flows as if the luckless victim were melting away. In the best establishments an attendant fans the bather all the time the steam is let on, to cool the head, into which the heated blood rushes in a way that makes the wet towel smoke directly. And this is an attention the patient must insist upon, for faintness or apoplexy may be the alternative.

In the sultry and oppressive weather of summer the hot bath is of all others most cooling. No matter how heated the system, water as hot as possible is the safest and most efficient relief. One wants to remain in it long enough to give every part of the body a thorough scrubbing with soap and a mohair wash-cloth, which cleanses the skin more thoroughly than a brush. The hot water dissolves every particle of matter that clogs the pores, the rough cloth and soap remove it searchingly, and the towel is hardly laid aside before a delicious coolness and freshness passes upon one, like that of a dewy summer morning. The dangers resulting from a sudden check of perspiration by plunging into cold water when overheated, or by sitting in a draught to cool, are avoided, and a greater sense of coolness follows. People who suffer much in warm weather should reckon this a daily solace. All enervating effects are warded off by an instant’s plunge into cool water of, say, seventy degrees. I say cool, for it certainly will feel as if iced after a bath of nearly a hundred and fifty degrees. In a common bath-room, by this means, one may experience much of the real benefit of a Russian vapor-bath.

The bath lasts fifteen minutes, when the vapor is turned off. When the steam in the box has had time to condense, the cover is unjointed, and the bather treated to a scrubbing with soap and warm water, which gradually cools and cleanses the body. Then cooler water is poured over the body, and, after wiping, one is wrapped in a fresh sheet and lies down to pleasant dreams.

It is hard that such a necessary requisite to the highest vigor should rank, as it does, among luxuries. One can hardly imagine an addition to a fine house more desirable than a bathing-hall, such as Roman patricians added to their palaces, where any form of vapor or hot bath was at command.

Many improvements are needed in our public baths. There should be small dressing-closets, as there are at swimming-baths, where one’s clothes may be kept from contact with beds on which a thousand people rest in the course of a year. The reposing-hall should be well lighted, and paved with tiles, instead of being spread with bits of carpet to be tossed about; and there should be ample space between the couches. Every thing should convey the impression of space and repose—of sunshine, for the sake of its reviving power, and of refinement, for the soothing it always brings the nerves.

Usually the bath-house is built in a court-yard, where high walls on every side shut out the sunlight. The basement dressing-room is filled with narrow couches covered with light rubber sheets, suggestive of nothing more pleasant than cast-off clothing, and rest measured by the bath clock, when one’s pillow must be given up to a new-comer.

From this huddled room the bather steps into one beyond summer heat, dark and dripping with moisture, with a plunge bath in the centre. Passing through it, one finds next what seems like a wide marble staircase running the length of each side almost to the low roof, with gratings let in the face of the steps. The bather ascends one of these stony couches, and lies down with head on the stony pillow carved every six feet or so for the purpose. Wrapped in a sheet, already wet with moisture since leaving the dressing-room, a large sponge dipped in cold water at the back of one’s head, and another at the mouth and nose, one feels as if there were perspiration enough already for sanitary purposes; but when, with a hiss and a roar, the steam is let on through the gratings, one finds the difference. Rolling vapor fills the room, so dense that every outline is shut out as completely as in the darkest night. The heat rises to suffocation, the new bather thinks, and rushes again and again to the douche against the wall to wet her throbbing head, or into the next room, which seems cool as a waterfall, for a gasp of air that she can breathe. Old and experienced bathers lie still, declaring that, with head down and the wet sponge pressed to the nose, they breathe without difficulty. What was perspiration is literally a flowing away in rills and sheets of water that drip from the bather’s reeking sides. One seems to have turned to jelly, and submits helplessly to the scrubbing-brush and final shower-bath of water at eighty degrees, which causes a shiver by contrast.

The outer room is refreshing in its coolness, and one wraps a dry sheet and blanket round one and lies down on the India-rubber cloth in dreamy indifference to all the rest of the world.

What follows is Elysium. Every ache and pain, every care, is dispelled in a trance of rest.

All the descriptions by Eastern travelers of the luxury of the bath are found true in this last stage of enjoyment. One is rejuvenated, entranced, and sinks into a light sleep, whose approach seems a prelude to paradise. The eyes close to keep out the sordid surroundings of the bathing-room; and every idea, or rather sensation—for the brain is too passive to think—is bliss. This is the dolce far niente Italians aspire to—the sum of all delight possible to sensation. Passion and rapture have no charms that equal it. It is the death and extinction of all pain. Quite as beautiful is the return to consciousness, sense after sense regaining double brightness as softly and steadily as the unfolding of a flower.

After a reluctant waking and going out into the sunlight again one seems to have found a new self. The feather-like lightness and elasticity of every limb amount almost to delirium, they are so different from one’s usual dullness. It is freedom that feels like flying. If this is simply health, in our common state we must be farther toward extinction than we imagine.

In this state of purity and light one learns to reverence one’s physical self. A body that at its best is so glorious and happy ought not to be exposed to the disturbance of appetite and the contact of gross things. We need to be very much more refined in our living, eating, and breathing. We ought to be nicer about our clothes and our food, choosing the best of meats, and fruit far better than we are now content with, and should place our dwellings out of the reach of the least impure air. In this altered and steadied frame evil dispositions lose their sway. Irritable temper is soothed, despondency flees as by magic, and fiercer passions lie asleep as at the stroking of their manes. If any one should read this page who battles with unnatural desires, which make life less blessed and lofty than it was meant to be, let her have recourse to this efficient ally. It will restore one from the horrible depression which craves alcohol or opium, it will rescue from the perilous excitement of overwrought nerves or too much brain-work, and banish those morbid feelings which consciously or unconsciously incline to impurity of imagination if not of life. The purity of the body and the soul are too closely interwoven for any one to dare neglect them.

In the old time, saints used to subdue the body by prayer and fasting. The modern way is by prayer and bathing.

It is hard enough to keep a peaceable, firm, and sweet habit of soul without letting loose on it the humors and insanities of the body. These are in no way so surely quelled as by warm baths, and this is why they ought to be among the public buildings of every village, and made as cheap as possible. There the drunkard might find a stimulus which has no reaction, the emotionally insane a sedative that would clear his brain and steady his nerves. There the exhausted watcher by the sick might recruit, and the overwrought student, lawyer, or physician find support without recourse to perilous stimulants. The doors of such a place in a large city should stand open night and day, like those of churches.

Women need the bath for all these purposes even more than men. The feeble mother will find no soothing for her jarred nerves or lightener of her burdens like the well-applied bath. Strange as it sounds, the vapor-bath does not weaken. It washes away the worse particles of the body that weigh it down, and leaves it as if winged. I have known an invalid of years take it twice and thrice a week, gaining strength every time. If harm came, it is because the head was not kept cool by fanning, or because the final sponging was not gradual enough. There is harm in every remedy used unskillfully. It is the doctor’s province to direct in such matters, always premising that the best and wisest physicians prefer to teach their clients the rules of health and treatment for themselves, and seldom refuse to give the reason and theory of their orders. It is safe to be shy of the perceptions and methods of a doctor who doesn’t like to tell what medicines he gives, and why he gives them. The keenest and best medical men are impatient to have others see and understand the truth as well as themselves.

CHAPTER XXI.

Devices of Uneasy Age.—Bread Paste and Court-plaster to Conceal Wrinkles.—Accepting the Situation.—Plain Women and Agreeable Toilets.—Examples.—The Rector’s Daughter.—Dressing on Two Hundred a Year.—Écru Linen and White Nansook.—A Senator’s Wife.—A Washington Success.—Dull, Thin Faces.—Hay-colored Hair.—Advantages of Lining Rooms with Mirrors.

Did you ever go to see a lady, not of uncertain but of uneasy age, and find yourself ushered into the family sitting-room by a new servant, who did not know the ways of the house? Did you find her with a court-plaster lozenge an inch wide between her eyes, and one at the outer ends of her eyebrows? At sight of this remarkable ornament, did concern express itself lest she had fallen down stairs, or had a difference with the cat? Were these insinuations parried with veteran resources, and were you dissuaded from further inquiry by the delicate remark that she could interest you better than by giving the history of her scratches? Of course you knew there was a mystery about those bits of court-plaster, and perhaps feel so to this day, unless Nature have given you the mind of a detective. If so, your patience is to be rewarded. The secret of those patches was not scratches, but wrinkles.

I trust due tribute will be paid to the ingenuity of failing age, which has perfected this device for warding off its unwelcome tokens. The rationale of the plan is very simple. The plaster contracts the skin, and prevents its sinking into creases and lines. It also protects and softens the skin. I have heard of one oldish lady who wears these ornamental appendages all the time in the house when not receiving company, and covers parts of her face with a dough made of well-mumbled bread to keep her complexion fair. The heroism of this resistance to time must be applauded, but it is an open question whether the play is worth the candle. The beauty of age lies not in freshness like that of sixteen, but in clear and lofty expression, in the look of experience and not unkindly shrewdness, in the finish of self-repression, of calmness, trust, and sympathy. These things grow on a face as it loses freshness and roundness, just as the sky begins to show through thinning boughs.

The greatest of blessings for some people would be to learn to accept themselves and their gifts. If they could stand apart from themselves a while to see their becoming points, much of their repining would be dropped. Every thing and every body is beautiful in its season. There is a wholesome plainness that accords with domestic life and natural surroundings, as the bark of trees relieves their green. The color of health, the gentleness and sweetness that come of a conquered self, are elements of beauty that make any face tolerable. How dear are the plain faces that have watched our childhood, with whom we have grown up so closely that feature and form have lost their significance, so that we really do not know whether they are homely or not, and see only the love or the humor that lives in their faces. In general, very ugly people are happily indifferent to their looks, and degrees of imperfection may always be lessened by judicious use of the arts of dress.

A young and homely woman makes herself agreeable by the complete neatness of a very simple toilet. Let her eschew dresses of two colors, or of two shades even, though the latter are allowable, if the shadings are very soft. When the complexion is dull, there must be some warm or lively tinges of color in the costume, and vice versa. But it is easier to dress real figures than to generalize.

Cornelia Jackson is the rector’s daughter, and hasn’t above $200 a year to spend on her clothes and to buy Christmas presents. She is a little too plump, is brown, with some warm color in her cheeks in summer, and has dark hair. Her face never would be noticed except for the jollity lurking in it, which she inherits from her father. In winter and fall, when she looks pale, she “tones up” with a morning dress of all-wool stuff, one of those brown grounds with small bunches of brilliant crimson or purple flowers—a cheery pattern that the rector likes behind the coffee urn of a cold morning—with crisp white ruffles, set off by the brown dress. Crimson or purple, in soft brilliant shades, are her colors for neck-ties. Her street dress is a dark walnut-brown cloth, trimmed with cross-cut velvet the same shade. The over-skirts of Cornelia’s dresses are always long, so that she will not look like a fishing-bob or a doll pin-cushion; and there is deep rose-color about her bonnet. Not roses, by the way—she has an unspoken feeling that it is not for every body to wear roses—but velvety mallows and double stocks, imitations of fragrant common garden flowers that are very like herself. The brown and crimson maiden is a pleasant sight of a winter’s day, when the gray of the church and white of the snow need something warm to come between them. In summer she chooses, or her cousin in New York chooses for her, not the light percales that every one else is wearing, nor the grays and stone-colors that walk to church every Sunday, but écru linens, with relief of black or brown for morning, when she goes from pantry to garden, and from sewing-machine to nursery. Afternoons she doesn’t divide herself by putting on a white blouse and colored skirt, or a buff redingote over a black train, but wears a dress of one color, that looks as if it were meant to stay at home. White nansook is her delight, its semi-transparency wonderfully suiting her clear brownness, but solid white linen or cambric she eschews. Soft violet jaconet, and the whole family of lilacs, are made for her; and she is luxurious in ruffles and flounces on her demi-trained skirts, since she makes and often irons them herself. Black grenadine, of course, she wears, with high lining to give her waist its full length, every bit of which it needs; and she is not too utilitarian to neglect the aid which a modest demi-train on a house dress gives to her height. All the other girls may wear puffed waists and pleated waists. She knows they are not for her plump shoulders, though clusters of fine tucks on a blouse give length to the waist, and lessen the width of the back. Shawls she never wears, nor short perky basques, that are considered—I don’t know why—the proper thing for stout figures. Her choice is the long polonaise, and the French jacket, which by its short shoulders and simple lines conveys a decent comeliness of figure to any one who wears it. If she had a party dress, it would be white muslin, or light silvery green silk, trimmed with pleatings of tulle, and with them she would wear her mother’s pearls, or her own fine carbuncles.

Mrs. Senator, with all her fortune and position, is doomed to hear people speak of her in under-tones at parties, “She is rich, but very plain.” Being a shrewd woman, she does not waste her efforts on trying to alter her thin features, nor does she make herself ridiculous by a false complexion of rouge and pearl-powder, though her face and her hair are about of a brownness. But on her entry into Washington society she defied criticism by appearing with her hair créped to show its soft brown lights and shades, and give the best outline to her head, her gypsy face opposed to a dead white silk, of Parisian origin, with flounce of pleated muslin, and corsage trimmings of rich lace. It is a real dress and a real woman that is described, and it is no fiction that she was the success of the evening. The colorless dress without reflets, and her ornaments of clustered pearls, were in most artistic contrast to the nut-brown hair and dusky face. A spot of color would have destroyed the charm. The dress stamped her, as she was, a woman of skill sufficient to draw from the most unlikely combination the elements of novel and complete success.

The girl who sits near me at the hotel table tries my eyes with her thin, curious features, her pale, frizzed hair, that makes her face more peaked than it is, and her oversized skirts. She ought not to wear those light dresses, for she has no color, and her thin complexion is not even clear. She has that difficult figure to dispose of, which is at once girlish and tall, without seeming so. A trained dress would make her look lean, so she should dispense with a large tournure, and let her dresses brush the floor a few inches, wearing as many small flounces below the knee as fashion and sense allow. If her mother, who is rather a strict lady, would insist on having the girl’s dresses made with puffed waists, or loose blouses of thick linen, instead of the Victoria lawns that iron so flat, and show the poor shoulder-blades frightfully, the effect would be rather delightful. She ought to wear puffed grenadines and lenos of maroon, rosy lilac, or deep green—the first lighted with pale rosy bows at the throat and in the hair, the latter with light green and white, the lilac with periwinkle knots. How one would like to dress her over again, and turn the poor thing out charming as she ought to be. Her hair-dressing would all have to be done over again. Sharp-featured people shouldn’t wear curls, which make the peaked effect still more prominent. Soft waves, drawn lightly away from the face and brushed up from the neck behind, would be better, and smooth braids best of all, with little waves peeping out under them. If the young woman could train herself not to be excitable, or to smile so overcomingly, and not be so eager to meet new acquaintances, she would make a pleasing impression, while now she gets snubbed in a tacit way, and those who take her up out of pity hardly feel as if they were paid for it. If women with hay-colored hair could be brought to believe that light brown, of all others, wasn’t the color for their style, one could afford to overlook minor deficiencies.

One is tempted to think sometimes that there is a loss in not adopting the French plan of lining houses with mirrors. If people continually caught sight of themselves, they would hardly indulge in the grimaces and gaucheries which they inflict on the world. It could hardly lead to vanity in most cases, and would settle many vexing problems of dress and demeanor. One is not always to be censured for studying the glass. The orator must use it to learn how to deliver his sentences with proper facial play and easy gesture. The public singer studies with a mirror on the music-rack to get the right position of the mouth for issuing the voice without making a face. The want of such training mars the work of some great artists with blemishes which nearly undo the effect of their talents.

The injunction that all things should be done decently and in order means that they ought to be pleasing. The study of ourselves can hardly be complete without the aid of the mirror, which shows candidly the cold smile, the vacant, bashful gaze, we give our fellow-beings, instead of the decent attention, the kind, full glance it is meet they should have from us, and which we prefer to receive from them. It shows the frown, the sour melancholy, which creep over the face in reveries, and leads us to try and feel pleasant that we may look so. How much confidence one assuring glance at a mirror has given us in going to receive a visitor, and what kindly warning of what was amiss in expression or toilet before it was too late! Is our vanity so easily excited that we are ready to fall in love with ourselves at sight? The intimate acquaintance with our appearance which the glass can give is more likely to make one genuinely humble. In a world which owns among its maxims the gay and wicked refrain of “manners for us, morals for those who like them,” good people can not afford to neglect either their toilets or their mirrors.

CHAPTER XXII.

Physical Education of Girls.—A Woman’s Value in the World.—High-bred Figures.—Antique Races.—Inspiration of Art not Vanity.—The Trying Age.—Dress, Food, and Bathing for Young Girls.—A Veto on Close Study.—Braces and Backboards.—Never Talk of Girls’ Feelings.—Exercise for the Arms.—Singing Scales with Corsets off.—Development of the Bust.—Open-work Corsets the Best.—The Bayaderes of India and their Forms.—The Delicacy due Young Girls.—A Frank but Needed Caution.—Care of the Figure after Nursing.

American girls begin to make much of physical culture. As they advance in refinement they see how much of their value in society depends on the nerve and spirit which accompanies thorough development. It is not enough that they know how to dance languidly, and carry themselves in company. To distinguish herself, a young belle must row, swim, skate, ride, and even shoot, to say nothing of lessons in fencing, which noble ladies in Germany, and some of foreign family here, take to develop sureness of hand and agility. The heavy, flat-footed creature who can not walk across a room without betraying the bad terms her joints are on with each other, must have a splendid face and fortune to keep any place in the world, no matter how good her family, or how varied her acquirements, though she speaks seven languages like a native, and has played sonatas since she was eight years old. A woman’s value depends entirely on her use to the world and to that person who happens to have the most of her society. A man likes the society of a woman who can walk a mile or two to see an interesting view, and can take long journeys without being laid up by them. He likes smooth motions, round arms and throat, head held straight, and shoulders that do not bow out. When you see that a fine figure must be a straight line from the roots of the hair to the base of the shoulder-blade, you will realize how few women approach this high-bred ideal. Special culture, indeed, is discerned where such excellence of line meets the eye. The polished races of the East, who, untutored and degraded, yet have the entail of antique subtlety and art, inherit such figures along with the proverbs of sages and palace mosaics. The best-born of all countries have this noble set of head, this lance-like figure, and easy play of limb. As surely as one can be educated to right thoughts and manners, so the motions and poise of limb can be trained to correctness. The work must begin early. A girl should be put in training as soon as she passes from the plumpness of childhood into the ugly age of development. The mother should inspect her dressing to see what improvement is needed, and stimulate the child by the desire to possess beautiful limbs and figure. The senses are early awake to the sense of grace. There is no better way to inspire a girl with it than to take her to picture-galleries, show the faces of historical beauties, or the figures of Italian sculpture, and ask her if she would not like to have the same fine points herself. This substitutes the love of art for that of admiration, and makes self-cultivation too deep a thing for vanity.

There is a time when girls are awkward, indolent, and capricious. Their boisterous spirits at one time, their sickly minauderies at another, are very trying to mothers and teachers. The cause is often set down as depravity, when it is only nature. Girls are lapsided and indolent because they are weak or languid, between which and being lazy there is a vast difference. They have demanding appetites that strike grown people with wonder. They go frantic on short notice when their wishes are crossed. Mother, if such is the case, your growing girl is weak. The nursery bath Saturday night is not enough. Encourage her to take a sponge-bath every day. When she comes in heated from a long walk or play, see that she bathes her knees, elbows, and feet in cold water, to prevent her growing nervous with fatigue when the excitement is over. See that she does not suffer from cold, and that she is not too warmly dressed, remembering a plump, active child will suffer with heat under the clothes it takes to keep you comfortable. If she is thin and sensitive, care must be taken against sudden chills. Keep her on very simple but well-flavored diet, with plenty of sour fruit, if she crave it, for the young have a facility for growing bilious, which acids correct. Sweet-pickles not too highly spiced are favorites with children, and better than sweetmeats. Nuts and raisins are more wholesome than candies. New cheese and cream are to be preferred to butter with bread and vegetables. Soup and a little of the best and juiciest meat should be given at dinner. But the miscellaneous stuffing that half-grown girls are allowed to indulge in ruins their complexion, temper, and digestion. No coffee nor tea should be taken by any human being till it is full-grown. The excitement of young nerves by these drinks is ruinous. Besides, the luxury and the stimulus is greater to the adult when debarred from these things through childhood. Neither mind nor body should be worked till maturity. Children will do all they ought in study and work without much urging; and they will learn more and remember more in two hours of study to five of play, than if the order is inverted. Say to a child, Get this lesson and you may go to play—and you will be astonished to see how rapidly it learns; but if one lesson is to succeed another till six dreary hours have dragged away, it loses heart, and learns merely what can not well be helped. A girl under eighteen ought not to practice at the piano or sit at a desk more than three quarters of an hour at a time. Then she should run out-of-doors ten minutes, or exercise, to relieve the nerves. An adult never ought to study or sit more than an hour without brief change before passing to the next. This keeps the head clearer, the limbs fresher, and carries one through a day with less fatigue than if one worked eight hours and then rested four.

Thoughtful teachers do not share the prejudice against braces and backboards for keeping the figure straight, especially when young. It is the instinct of barbarous nations to use such aids in compelling erectness in their children. These appliances need not be painful in the least, but rather relieve tender muscles and bones. Languid girls should take cool sitz-baths to strengthen the muscles of the back and hips, which are more than ordinarily susceptible of fatigue when childhood is over. But never talk of a girl’s feelings in mind or body before her, or suffer her to dwell on them. The effect is bad physically and mentally. See that these injunctions are obeyed implicitly; spare her the whys and wherefores. It is enough for her to know that she will feel better for them. Of all things, deliver us from valetudinarians of fifteen. Never laugh at them; never sneer; never indulge them in self-condolings. Be pitiful and sympathetic, but steadily turn their attention to something interesting outside of themselves.

Special means are essential to special growth. Throwing quoits and sweeping are good exercises to develop the arms. There is nothing like three hours of house-work a day for giving a woman a good figure, and if she sleep in tight cosmetic gloves, she need not fear that her hands will be spoiled. The time to form the hands is in youth, and with thimbles for the finger-tips, and close gloves lined with cold cream, every mother might secure a good hand for her daughter. She should be particular to see that long-wristed lisle-thread gloves are drawn on every time the girl goes out. Veils she should discard, except in cold and windy weather, when they should be drawn close over the head. A broad-leafed hat for the country is protection enough for the summer; the rest of the year the complexion needs all the sun it can get.

There is commonly a want of fullness in those muscles of the shoulder which give its graceful slope. This is developed by the use of the skipping-rope, in swinging it over the head, and by battledoor, which keeps the arms extended, at the same time using the muscles of the neck and shoulders. Swinging by the hands from a rope is capital, and so is swinging from a bar. These muscles are the last to receive exercise in common modes of life, and playing ball, bean-bags, or pillow-fights are convenient ways of calling them into action. Singing scales with corsets off, shoulders thrown back, lungs deeply inflated, mouth wide open, and breath held, is the best tuition for insuring that fullness to the upper part of the chest which gives majesty to a figure even when the bust is meagre. These scales should be practiced half an hour morning and afternoon, gaining two ends at once—increase of voice and perfection of figure.

This brings us to the inquiries made by more than one correspondent for some means of developing the bust. Every mother should pay attention to this matter before her daughters think of such a thing for themselves, by seeing that their dresses are never in the least constricted across the chest, and that a foolish dressmaker never puts padding into their waists. The horrible custom of wearing pads is the ruin of natural figures, by heating and pressing down the bosom. This most delicate and sensitive part of a woman’s form must always be kept cool, and well supported by a linen corset. The open-worked ones are by far the best, and the compression, if any, should not be over the heart and fixed ribs, as it generally is, but just at the waist, for not more than the width of a broad waistband. Six inches of thick coutille over the heart and stomach—those parts of the body that have most vital heat—must surely disorder them and affect the bust as well. It would be better if the coutille were over the shoulders or the abdomen, and the whalebones of the corset held together by broad tapes, so that there would be less dressing over the heart, instead of more. A low, deep bosom, rather than a bold one, is a sign of grace in a full-grown woman, and a full bust is hardly admirable in an unmarried girl. Her figure should be all curves, but slender, promising a fuller beauty when maturity is reached. One is not fond of over-ripe pears.

Flat figures are best dissembled by puffed and shirred blouse-waists, or by corsets with a fine rattan run in the top of the bosom gore, which throws out the fullness sufficiently to look well in a plain corsage. Of all things, India-rubber pads act most injuriously by constantly sweating the skin, and ruining the bust beyond hope of restoration. To improve its outlines, wear a linen corset fitting so close at the end of the top gores as to support the bosom well. For this the corset must be fitted to the skin, and worn next the under-flannel. Night and morning wash the bust in the coldest water—sponging it upward, but never down. Madame Celnart relates that the bayaderes of India cultivate their forms by wearing a cincture of linen under the breasts, and at night chafing them lightly with a piece of linen. The breasts should never be touched but with the utmost delicacy, as other treatment renders them weak and flaccid, and not unfrequently results in cancer. A baby’s bite has more than once inflicted this disease upon its mother. But one thing is to be solemnly cautioned, that no human being—doctor, nurse, nor the mother herself—on any pretense, save in case of accident, be allowed to touch a girl’s figure. It would be unnecessary to say this, were not French and Irish nurses, especially old and experienced, ones, sometimes in the habit of stroking the figures of young girls committed to their charge, with the idea of developing them. This is not mentioned from hearsay. Mothers can not be too careful how they leave their children with even well-meaning servants. A young girl’s body is more sensitive than any harp is to the air that plays upon it. Nature—free, uneducated, and direct—responds to every touch on that seat of the nerves, the bosom, by an excitement that is simply ruinous to a child’s nervous system. This is pretty plain talking, but no plainer than the subject demands. Girls are very different in their feelings. Some affectionate, innocent, hearty natures remain through their lives as simple as when they were babes taking their bath under their mothers’ hands; while others, equally innocent but more susceptible, require to be guarded and sheltered even from the violence of a caress as if from contagion and pain.

Due attention to the general health always has its effect in restoring the bust to its roundness. It is a mistake that it is irremediably injured by nursing children. A babe may be taught not to pinch and bite its mother, and the exercise of a natural function can injure her in no way, if proper care is taken to sustain the system at the same time. Cold compresses of wet linen worn over the breast are very soothing and beneficial, provided they do not strike a chill to a weak chest. At the same time, the cincture should be carefully adjusted. Weakness of any kind affects the contour of the figure, and it is useless to try to improve it in any other way than by restoring the strength where it is wanting. Tepid sitz-baths strengthen the muscles of the hips, and do away with that dragging which injures the firmness of the bosom. Bathing in water to which ammonia is added strengthens the skin, but the use of camphor to dry the milk after weaning a child is reprehensible. No drying or heating lotions of any kind should ever be applied except in illness.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Hands and Complexions.—Preparing for Parties.—Refining Rough Faces.—Carbolic Baths.—Chalk and Cascarilla.—Glycerine Wash.—School-girls’ Flushed Hands and Faces.—To Soften the Hands.—Red Noses.—Secrets of Making-up.—Cologne for the Eyes.—Cosmetic Gloves.—To Impart a Brilliant Complexion.

People are in trouble in cold weather about their hands and their complexions, which take the time when parties abound, and owners need their very best looks, to put on a ruinous air. It is more than suspected that the young lady who begs for some good face powder or wash that will hide a bad complexion without spoiling it entirely, has the end in view of making herself presentable in society for the winter. Her entirely reasonable request shall be attended to, no less on her own account than because she writes in the name of four devoted subscribers. Carbolic soaps fail to remove the roughness of her used complexion, and internal remedies must be resorted to. These should be prescribed by a physician, and would be passed over at once to his province had not long experience shown that doctors scoff at the idea of prescribing for such puny troubles as flesh-worms and pimples while there are so many typhoid fevers and chronic ulcers to be treated. The pimples foretold the fever, and the impurities that first showed themselves in the shape of “black-heads” might have been discharged at the time, and not left to malignant issues. Pimples are disease of a light form, and nature tries to throw off in this way bad blood that might give one a worse turn if kept in the body. It can not be said too often that next to keeping murder and wickedness out of one’s soul is the necessity of keeping one’s blood pure by good food, strict cleanliness, warmth, and bright, sweet air. These troublesome pimples are a sign that the young ladies who complain of them have eaten food that did not suit them, eaten irregularly, or not bathed often enough, since some skins require more frequent cleansing and stimulus than others, because they secrete more. Perhaps other functions are disturbed, or the blood is not stirred enough by lively exercise. Directions for diet have been given before in these pages. It will be enough to recommend people with irritable blood to drink a glass or two of mild cider, or eat oranges or lemons, as they fancy, within the half hour before each meal, especially before breakfast. As hard work or exercise as one can endure stirs sluggish secretions, and work should always be brisk. Many a young woman mopes over house-work day after day, standing on her feet most of the time, and fancies that she has exercise, when her slow blood does not once in ten hours receive impulse enough to send it vigorously from head to foot in a way one could call living. “Work swiftly and rest well,” ought to be a woman’s rule. When the blood flows swiftly, the eye is clear, the sight better, the skin refined, and the whole body feels improvement; memory and thought are improved, idleness takes wing, and happiness steals into the heart.

Young ladies should not give up their bathing with carbolic soap. Hot water, with a spoonful of prophylactic fluid or phenyl to each quart, is a very wholesome bath in skin disorders, followed by a brisk rub with crash till warm, or wrapping in a blanket by the fire till all danger of chilliness is past. The phenyl and prophylactic fluid are milder forms of carbolic acid, and, like it, disinfectant and healing. A sponge-bath or plunge at seventy-five degrees after a hot bath prevents all weakening effects and taking cold. None but robust persons should ever take baths except in a warm room. The bath-room should always be so arranged as to be heated in a few minutes. Otherwise the bath is best taken in one’s own room before the fire.

The disguise for a bad skin is easily found. Refined chalk is the safest thing to use, and costs far less by its own name than put up in photograph boxes as “Lily White,” etc. Cascarilla powder, which the Cuban ladies use so much, is recommended as entirely harmless. It is prepared from a root used in medicine, and in New York is sold at all the little Cuban shops, with cigars, tropic sweetmeats, and other necessaries of life. Either wash the face with thick suds from glycerine soap, and dust the powder on with a swan’s-down puff, removing superfluous traces with a fresh puff kept for the purpose, or else grind the powder in wet linen by pressing it in the fingers, and apply what oozes through to the skin. A fine wash for a rough or sunburned skin is made of two ounces of distilled water, one ounce of glycerine, one ounce of alcohol, and half an ounce of tincture of benzoin. Without the water, and with the addition of two ounces of prepared chalk free from bismuth, it makes a far better cosmetic for whitening the face than any of the expensive “Balms of Youth” or “Magnolia Blooms.” If a flesh tint is desired, add a grain of carmine.

The lesser trial of rough, red hands that are not chapped but unsightly, when not caused by exposure and work, indicates bad circulation of the blood. School-girls who study a good deal without due exercise often go home with flushed faces and red hands, to say nothing of an irritable state of the nerves, that can only be righted by very regular sleep and exercise, aided by hot foot-baths. Out-door exercise in winter is an excellent corrective for rush of blood to the head. Dancing brings the blood into play more healthfully than any movement allowed to grown women. The hands are improved by wearing gloves that fit closely, especially if they are of soft castor or dog-skin. In most cases, all that is needed to soften hands is to rub sweet-almond oil into the skin two or three days in succession. A quicker way than this in the country is to hold the hand on a rapidly turning grindstone a moment or two. It leaves the palm, forefinger, and thumb satin smooth, and removes callosities incredibly quick, taking off bad stains at the same time. Farmers’ girls will take note of this, and also that rubbing the hands with a slice of raw potato will remove vegetable stains. Rubbing the hands well with almond-oil, and plastering them with as much fine chalk as they can take, on going to bed, will usually whiten them in three days’ time, and this hint may be of service before a party of consequence.

Redness of the nose is a sign of bad circulation and of humor in the blood. It is best treated by applications of phenyl, rubbed on often each day, and by alteratives. A spoonful of white mustard-seed taken in water before breakfast every morning is of service in this case and in rush of blood to the head, which always has something to do with constipation. Refined chalk made into a thick plaster with one third as much glycerine as water, and spread on the parts, will cool erysipelatous inflammation and reduce the redness.

The secrets of “making-up” have hardly all been mentioned, though the list is growing long. What girl does not know that eating lump-sugar wet with Cologne just before going out will make her eyes bright, or that the homelier mode of flirting soap-suds into them has the same effect? Spanish ladies squeeze orange juice into their eyes to make them shine. A Continental recipe for whitening the hands looks strong enough: Take half a pound of soft-soap, a gill of salad-oil, an ounce of mutton tallow, and boil together; after boiling ceases, add one gill of spirits of wine and a scruple of ambergris; rip a pair of gloves three sizes too large, spread them with this paste, and sew up to be worn at night. A curious wash, evidently Italian in its origin, is: Equal parts of melon, pumpkin, gourd, and cucumber seeds pounded to powder, softened with cream, and thinned to a paste with milk, perfumed with a grain of musk and three drops of oil of lemon (oil of jasmine may be substituted for the musk). The face, bosom, and arms are anointed with this overnight, and washed off in warm water in the morning. The authority quoted says it adds remarkable purity and brilliance to the complexion. Such pains will women take for that beauty which, after all, is only skin deep. But did not De Staël say she would give half her knowledge for personal charms.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Women’s Looks and Nerves.—A Low-toned Generation.—Children and their Ways.—Brief Madness.—Women in the Woods.—Singing.—Work well done the Easiest.—Sleep the Remedy for Temper.—Hours for Sleep.—The Great Medicines—Sunshine, Music, Work, and Sleep.

Women’s looks depend too much on the state of their nerves and their peace of mind to pass them over. The body at best is the perfect expression of the soul. The latter may light wasted features to brilliance, or turn a face of milk and roses dark with passion or dead with dullness; it may destroy a healthy frame or support a failing one. Weak nerves may prove too much for the temper of St. John, and break down the courage of Saladin. Better things are before us, coming from a fuller appreciation of the needs of body and soul, but the fact remains that this is a generation of weak nerves. It shows particularly in the low tone of spirits common to men and women. They can not bear sunshine in their houses; they find the colors of Jacques Minot roses and of Gérome’s pictures too deep; the waltz in Traviata is too brilliant, Rossini’s music is too sensuous, and Wagner’s too sensational; Mendelssohn is too light, Beethoven too cold. Their work is fuss; instead of resting, they idle—and there is a wide difference between the two things. People who drink strong tea and smoke too many cigars, read or stay in-doors too much, find the hum of creation too loud for them. The swell of the wind in the pines makes them gloomy, the sweep of the storm prostrates them with terror, the everlasting beating of the surf and the noises of the streets alike weary their worthless nerves. The happy cries of school-children at play are a grievance to them; indeed, there are people who find the chirp of the hearth cricket and the singing tea-kettle intolerable. But it is a sign of diseased nerves. Nature is full of noises, and only where death reigns is there silence. One wishes that the men and women who can’t bear a child’s voice, a singer’s practice, or the passing of feet up and down stairs might be transported to silence like that which wraps the poles or the spaces beyond the stars, till they could learn to welcome sound, without which no one lives.

Children must make noise, and a great deal of it, to be healthy. The shouts, the racket, the tumble and turmoil they make, are nature’s way of ventilating their bodies, of sending the breath full into the very last corner of the lungs, and the blood and nervous fluid into every cord and fibre of their muscles. Instead of quelling their riot, it would be a blessing to older folks to join it with them. There is an awful truth following this assertion. Do you know that men and women go mad after the natural stimulus which free air and bounding exercise supply? It is the lack of this most powerful inspiration, which knows no reaction, that makes them drunkards, gamesters, and flings them into every dissipation of body and soul. Men and women, especially those leading studious, repressed lives, often confess to a longing for some fierce, brief madness that would unseat the incubus of their lives. Clergymen, editors, writing women, and those who lead sedentary lives, have said in your hearing and mine that something ailed them they could not understand. They felt as if they would like to go on a spree, dance the tarantella, or scream till they were tired. They thought it the moving of some depraved impulse not yet rooted out of their natures, and to subdue it cost them hours of struggle and mortification. Poor souls! They need not have visited themselves severely if they had known the truth that this lawless longing was the cry of idle nerve and muscle, frantic through disuse. What the clergyman wanted was to leave his books and his subdued demeanor for the hill-country, for the woods, where he could not only walk, but leap, run, shout, and wrestle, and sing at the full strength of his voice. The editor needed to leave his cigar and the midnight gas-light for a wherry race, or a jolly roll and tumble on the green. The woman, most of all, wanted a tent built for her on the shore, or on the dry heights of the pine forest, where she would have to take sun by day and balsamic air by night; where she would have to leap brooks, gather her own fire-wood, climb rocks, and laugh at her own mishaps. Or, if she were city-pent, she needed to take some child to the Park and play ball with it, and run as I saw an elegant girl dressed in velvet and furs run through Madison Square one winter day with her little sister. The nervous, capricious woman must be sent to swimming-school, or learn to throw quoits or jump the rope, to wrestle or to sing. There is nothing better for body and mind than learning to sing, with proper method, under a teacher who knows how to direct the force of the voice, to watch the strength, and expand the emotions at the same time. The health of many women begins to improve from the time they study music. Why? Because it furnishes an outlet for their feelings, and equally because singing exerts the lungs and muscles of the chest which lie inactive. The power for the highest as well as the lowest note is supplied by the bellows of the lungs, worked by the mighty muscles of the chest and sides. In this play the red blood goes to every tiny cell that has been white and faint for want of its food; the engorged brain and nervous centres where the blood has settled, heating and irritating them, are relieved; the head feels bright, the hands grow warm, the eyes clear, and the spirits lively. This is after singing strongly for half an hour. The same effect is gained by any other kind of brisk work that sets the lungs and muscles going, but as music brings emotion into play, and is a pleasure or a relief as it is melancholy or gay, it is preferable. The work that engages one’s interest as well as strength is always the best. Per contra, whatever one does thoroughly and with dispatch seldom continues distasteful. There is more than we see at a glance in the command, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” The reason given, because the time is short for all the culture and all the good work we wish to accomplish, is the apparent one; but the root of it lies in the necessities of our being. Only work done with our might will satisfy our energies and keep their balance. Half the women in the world are suffering from chronic unrest, morbid ambitions, and disappointments that would flee like morning mist before an hour of hearty, tiring work.

It is not so much matter what the work is, as how it is done.

The weak should take work up by degrees, working half an hour and resting, then going at it steadily again. It is better to work a little briskly and rest than to keep on the slow drag through the day. Learn not only to do things well, but to do them quickly. It is disgraceful to loiter and drone over one’s work. It is intolerable both in music and in life.

The body, like all slaves, has the power to react on its task-master. All mean passions appear born of diseased nerves. Was there ever a jealous woman who did not have dyspepsia, or a high-tempered one without a tendency to spinal irritation? Heathen tempers in young people are a sign of wrong health, and mothers should send for physician as well as priest to exorcise them. The great remedy for temper is—sleep. No child that sleeps enough will be fretful; and the same thing is nearly as true of children of larger growth. Not less than eight hours is the measure of sleep for a healthy woman under fifty. She may be able to get on with less, and do considerable work, either with mind or hands. But she could do so much more, to better satisfaction, by taking one or two hours more sleep, that she can not afford to lose it. Women who use their brains—teachers, artists, writers, and housewives (whose minds are as hard wrought in overseeing a family as those of any one who works with pen or pencil)—need all the sleep they can get. From ten to six, or, for those who do not want to lose theatres and lectures altogether, from eleven to seven, are hours not to be infringed upon by women who want clear heads and steady tempers. What they gain by working at night they are sure to lose next day, or the day after. It is impossible to put the case too strongly. Unless one has taken a narcotic, and sleeps too long, one should never be awakened. The body rouses itself when its demands are satisfied. A warm bath on going to bed is the best aid to sleep. People often feel drowsy in the evening about eight or nine o’clock, but are wide awake at eleven. They should heed the warning. The system needs more rest than it gets, and is only able to keep up by drawing on its reserve forces. Wakefulness beyond the proper time is a sign of ill health as much as want of appetite at meals—it is a pity that people are not as much alarmed by it. The brain is a more delicate organ than the stomach, and nothing so surely disorders it as want of sleep. In trouble or sorrow, light sedatives should be employed, like red lavender or the bromate of potassa, for the nerves have more to bear, and need all the rest they can get. The warm bath, I repeat, is better than either.

Sunshine, music, work, and sleep are the great medicines for women. They need more sleep than men, for they are not so strong, and their nerves perhaps are more acute. Work is the best cure for ennui and for grief. Let them sing, whether of love, longing, or sorrow, pouring out their hearts, till the love returns into their own bosoms, till the longing has spent its force, or till the sorrow has lifted itself into the sunshine, and taken the hue of trust, not of despair.

CHAPTER XXV.

Changing Wigs and Chignons.—Matching Braids.—Frizzing the Hair.—Crimping-pins.—Blonde Hair-pins.—What Colors Hair.—Bleaching Tresses.—Sulphur Paste.—Foxy Locks.—Freshening Switches.

The secret of content for most women is not perfection, but change. They can not even be satisfied with their looks long at a time; but Mary, Queen of Hearts as well as Scots, must draw an auburn wig over her luxurious tresses, dark and smelling of violets, for which regal-haired Elizabeth would have given the ruffs out of her best gowns, and her recipe for yellow starch with them. The “pretty Miss Vavasour,” who changed her chignon every morning with her costume, was a type of the fickle beauties of the day, who are always better satisfied with some other woman’s style than their own. Women of intelligence send urgent requests for something to change the color of their hair, either to make the front locks match the châtelaine braid, or to bleach it outright. Fair blondes, whose sunny locks have been their pride, find with dismay that this infantile tinge, which makes a woman look so young and charming, is deepening into mature ash-brown—a shade with no prestige or attraction whatever. In their exact eyes it is mortifying to wear a blonde braid several degrees lighter than the crown tresses. These last are growing, and constantly change, while the ends keep their early tinge. Very few light-haired people pass from youth to middle age without such a change. But, unless the difference is very startling, it may be made agreeable by skillfully dressing the hair. Light or varied hair should be crimped or waved, when its tints will appear like the play of light and shade. Contrary to all writers on this point, I contend that crimping does not necessarily injure the hair. If it is killed—pulled out by the roots, or broken by frizzing—the blame is due to careless or ignorant dressing. My own hair was dressed regularly twice or thrice a week with hot irons for years, and it never grew so fast or was in such a satisfactory state. It was thoroughly combed and brushed, kept clean by weekly washing, and each time it went under the curling-tongs it came out moist and stimulated by the heat. The reason was, the clever French coiffeur knew his business, and never allowed the hot iron to come directly in contact with the hair. Each lock was done up in papillotes, and then pinched with irons as hot as could be without scorching. Stiff hair may be trained to curl by long and patient treatment with hot irons, and be all the better for it. The secret of safe hair-dressing is never to pull the hair, never scorch, and always wrap a lock in paper before applying the iron. Common round curling-irons and frizzing-tongs may be safety used if thin Manilla paper is folded once around them. So in crimping: the hair may be done up on stout crimping-pins held by slides, or braided in and out of a loop of thick cord, a bit of thin paper folded over the crimp, and the pinching-iron used with safety every day, provided the hair is not pulled too tight in braiding it. The country method, where friseur’s irons are unknown, is to lay the head on a table, and set a hot smoothing-iron on the woven lock—an awkward but efficient process. It is not good to put the hair up on metal pins or hair-pins overnight for two reasons: the perspiration of the head will rust the pins, insensibly, so that they will cut the hair; and the contact of iron with the sulphurous gas given out by hair during sleep tends to darken and render the color displeasing. Rubber crimping-pins, fastened by a rubber catch, are a late invention, and a great improvement. But a loop of thick elastic cord is better than any thing. The hair is woven in and out as on a hair-pin, the elastic holds it when the fingers are withdrawn, and it is pleasanter to sleep in than half a dozen stiff pins. I know more than one piquant little lady whose “naturally” waving tresses are the admiration of her friends by this simple means; and as the process has gone on for years without lessening the flow of ruffled hair, it must be conceded that crimping does not always hurt it. Iron hair-pins hurt the head more than a generation of friseurs. The latest accusation against them is that they draw off the healthy electricity of the head; and to a generation which complains of paralysis from using steel pens, and uses patent glass insulators for the legs of its bedsteads, this will seem no frivolous charge. The patent insulators are a fact. Their use is advised by medical men for all neuralgic, rheumatic, and sleepless people, and one of the largest glass firms in New York makes their manufacture a specialty. The patent and perfect hair-pin is not yet invented. Rubber pins are clumsy if harmless, but there are gilt hair-pins made of a yellow composition metal which are pleasanter to use than common ones, and very becoming in blonde hair. Dark-haired people must stick to the rubber pins, or at least see that their black ones are well japanned, so as not to cut their locks.

Now, to give an opinion about the change of hair, we must know something of its nature, and what colors it. Wise men say that light hair is owing to an abundance of sulphur in the system, and dark hair to an excess of iron. So if we comb light or red locks with lead combs for a long time, the lead acts on the sulphureted hydrogen evolved by the hair, and darkens it. If we can neutralize the iron in any way, a contrary effect will be obtained. To do this, work at the dark hair precisely as if it were an ink-spot to be taken out. The skin should not suffer, and to prevent this, oil it carefully along the parting, edges, and crown of the head, wiping the oil from the hair with a soft cloth. Oxalic acid, strong and hot, is the best thing to take out spots of ink made with iron, and we may try this with the hair. To apply this, or any of the preparations named, one should be in undress, wearing not a single article whose destruction would be of account, for all the acids and bleaching powders used ruin clothes if a drop touch them, taking the color out, and eating holes in the stoutest fabrics. The eyelids and brows should be well oiled to prevent the acid from attacking them, and the hands, shoulders, and face will be the better for similar protection. On one ounce of pure, strong oxalic acid pour one pint of boiling water, and, as soon as the hands can bear it, wet the head with a sponge, not sapping it, but moistening thoroughly. The effect may be hastened by holding the head in strong sunlight, or over a register, or the steam of boiling water. Five minutes ought to show a decided change, but if it do not, wet again and again, allowing the acid to remain as long as it does not eat the skin. This may not be hard to bear, but it will make the hair fall out.

Another mode is to cover the hair with a paste of powdered sulphur and water, and sit in the sun with it for several hours. The Venetian ladies used to steep their tresses in caustic solutions, and sit in their balconies in the sun all day, bleaching it; and yet another day, that the same rays might turn it yellow. Perhaps they gained by their folly in one way what they lost in another, for such an airing and sunning would benefit the health of any woman. A paste of bisulphate of magnesia and lime is very effectual for bleaching the hair; but it must be used with great caution not to burn hair, skin, and brains together. The moment it begins seriously to attack the skin it should be washed off in three waters, with lemon juice or vinegar in the last one to neutralize the alkali. These pastes are recommended to turn ash-colored hair light. To bleach dark hair is a long and tedious process, and such an utter piece of foolery that I do not care to recount the directions for it. The desire to change the color of the hair can only be justified when it is of a dull and sickly appearance, and this is best mended by improving the general health. Hair can not be glossy, rich-colored, and thick unless the bodily vigor is what it should be. Indeed, hair is one of the surest indexes to the state of health. Scorched and foxy locks are a sign of neglect and of bad secretions. Brushing remedies the first condition, hygiene the next. But among the varieties of treatment specially appropriate to restoration of the hair, sulphur vapor-baths must once more be mentioned. Doses of sulphur, taken in Dotheboys’ fashion weekly, with molasses, will be of service in keeping the blood pure, and in time will affect the hair; but this powerful agent should not be used without advice of a physician, and the dose should be always followed by simple purgatives, like mustard-seed, figs, or prunes, eaten freely. Chlorines and chlorides are specifics for bleaching hair, but they turn it gray or white, and the yellow tinge is dyed afterward. Sulphurous applications are the safest, if common caution is used not to take cold afterward or to breathe any fumes from them.

Switches that have lost freshness may be very much improved by dipping them into common ammonia without dilution. Half a pint is enough for the purpose. The life and color of the hair is revived as if it were just cut from the head. This dipping should be repeated once in three months, to free the switch from dust, as well as to insure safety from parasitic formations. The subject of coloring the hair will be spoken of in another chapter.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Hair and Complexion.—Black Dyes.—Persian Blue-Black.—Peroxide of Hydrogen.—Chloride of Gold.—Transient Dyes.

If it were easy to change the color of one’s hair, and possible to fix that change, which it is not, the result in most cases would be far from desirable. Nature tints hair and complexion in harmony with each other, and both should be deepened if one is altered. Human pictures as well as canvas would often be improved by bringing out the colors, but the free hand of Health, that divine artist, is the only one whose work is tolerable or enduring. In health this harmony of tint is varied and delicate, ranging from the rose-and-snow complexions that suit the true blonde dorée, the translucent honeysuckle-pink that sets off red-brown, blue-black, and olive-brown hair with decided warmth of cheeks, or purple-black reflets of the tresses with Spanish crimson, or rather the burning rose of tropic blood seen through smooth skin. Occasionally there comes an exciting discord, a minor strain of color that affects one like subtle music, such as the finding of dark eyes and golden hair, or clear, brilliant blue eyes in a gypsy face; but it is impossible to compose heads in reality with any satisfying results as yet. We have yet to learn how to work from the inside out, which is the only true method with human modeling.

All that can be said on this point, however, will not make the red-haired girl one whit less ardent in her desire to see her locks of darker shade, that they may be less conspicuous, or keep the dark-haired woman from the coveted vision of bright locks and black eyes. It is useless to talk about the dangers of the process, or hint that orpiment and realgar are deadly poisons. If every hair had to turn into a living snake while undergoing the change, it would hardly daunt this courageous vanity. The best to be hoped from any farther enlightenment is that they will renounce these active poisons for something comparatively harmless. Du reste, all readers will be interested in the secrets of the toilet, and the sight of science turned coiffeur.

It is comparatively a simple matter to dye hair black. Sulphur is one of the constituents of hair, which exhales it constantly in the form of sulphureted hydrogen, fortunately of the weakest sort, or it would be intolerable. When wet with a solution of certain metals, the action of this gas turns the hair black. Lead combs owe their efficiency to this cause. The lead which rubs on the hair is darkened by the gas, but the trace of lead at each combing is so slight that the operation must be many times repeated before it takes effect. But lead-coloring, whether applied by combs or by the paste of litharge, is a slow poison, not seldom causing paralysis, and even death. The absorption of lead into the system at any part is dangerous, but trebly so when applied so closely to the brain. The tint given by this means, as well as that dyed with nitrate of silver, is unnatural, greenish, and rusty in the light, needing continual repetition to appear decent.

Orientals are in the habit of dyeing their hair and beards the deep jetty black which they admire, if nature have not given them the desired depth of color. For this purpose Turks and Egyptians use a thick solution of native iron ore in pyrogallic acid, which gives the blackest and most unimpeachable color. The Persians prefer blue-black, and use indigo to produce it. European hair-dyers use a solution of iron, with hydrosulphate of ammonia to develop and fix the color, but the odor is objectionable. Dyes need to be applied once a week to keep the color vivid, and it is well to touch the partings twice as often with a fine comb dipped in the dye, as the hair always shows the natural color as fast as it grows from the roots.

Red and flaxen hair is changed to gold with little trouble, but dark hair must be bleached with chlorine before the desired tinge is given. The bleaching is the most difficult part of the work. Solutions sold for the purpose oftenest consist of peroxide of hydrogen—a somewhat costly liquid, I am told. Solution of sulphurous acid will also bleach hair; so will solutions of bisulphide of magnesia and of lime. The hair, properly faded or whitened, is colored yellow with solutions of cadmium, arsenic, or gold, but the cause of the change is the same that produces black dye. The reaction of sulphureted hydrogen on silver or lead turns things black, but on the metals first named turns them yellow. Arsenic in the shape of orpiment or realgar, two deadly poisons, is the base of most golden hair-dyes, and numerous cases of poisoning have resulted from their use. Cadmium is harmless, and yields quite as brilliant a tinge as arsenic, though less used. Chloride of gold dyes a very satisfactory brown, available for eyebrows, lashes, and whiskers. It must be used with exceeding care, however, for it stains the skin as well as the hair. If applied with a fine-tooth comb dipped in the liquid, combing the ends first, and ceasing just before the skin is reached, the dye will probably “take” by means of capillary attraction, without affecting the face. Cautious use of this preparation on the brows and lashes gives very pleasing results when these are much paler than the hair. They should be first carefully oiled, and the oil wiped off the hair, which is then touched with a fine sable pencil.

Fortunately, bleaching and dyeing are both such tedious processes that this circumstance alone will keep many persons from submitting to their bondage. Once applied, the dye becomes a necessity, much harder to leave off than to begin, as the English Dr. Scoffern says, who is authority for most suggestions in this chapter. One can not blame those persons who brush the roots of the hair or forehead and neck with amber lavender to disguise their pale, unsightly appearance, and a touch of the same liquid on white eyebrows does no harm. Walnut bark, steeped a week in Cologne, gives a dye that is transient, but easily applied with a brush each day, and has instant effect. It takes a day or two to bleach hair, and hours to color it either black or yellow; and the work has to be done over month by month in a fashion that brings the victim to speedy repentance of her folly.

INDEX.

Acid, Sulphurous, page 85.
Age, Devices of Uneasy, 212.
Amateur Hair-dressers, 89.
Appearance, how to Improve your Personal, 96.
Arabian Women Perfume themselves, how, 131.
Arms—
Whitening the, 64;
a Paste for Arms and Shoulders, 90;
how to Whiten the, 112;
a Paste for Whitening the, 128;
Exercise to Develop the, 231.
Artists, Woman’s, 87, 88.
Authors Eat, how, 102.
Awakened, Persons should not be, 255.
Awkward, when Girls are, 227.
Balconies and Parks, in, 98.
Banting System for Reducing Flesh, 175;
a Quaint Author, 176.
Bath—
Towels, 54;
Diana of Poitiers’, 71;
Sun, 97;
the Vapor, 129, 170;
Sulphur Vapor, 130;
Tepid, 152;
a Bath is an Extra at a Hotel, 168;
Sulphur, 170;
the Bran, 171;
the Russian Vapor, 205, 206, 207;
Sensations after a Russian, 208;
the Sitz, 230;
a Hot Soap-suds, 241;
a Sponge, 241;
a Warm Bath Good for the Nerves, 256.
Bathe, how Often we should, 171.
Bathing—
the Value of Hot, 54;
Magic Influence of, 89;
Bathing-Powder, 94;
Directions for, 159;
Experiments in Sulphur, 199;
Influence of, on Nerves and Passions, 209;
Bathing for Girls, 227.
Baths—
Sun, 20;
a Substitute for Sea, 55;
Fashionable, 87;
Public, 129, 201;
a Substitute for Vapor, 170;
Turkish Baths for Corpulency, 178;
Sulphur, 198;
Cautions about Sulphur Vapor, 200;
the Time to take Sulphur, 200;
Prices of Sulphur, 201;
how to take Sulphur, 202;
Hot Baths for Hot Weather, 203;
Russian Baths at Home, 204;
what Public Baths are, 205;
what Baths should be, 205;
Improvements Needed in Public, 205;
for Drunkards, 210.
Bay Rum for the Face, 172.
Bazin’s Pâte, 160.
Beauty—
the Worth of, 71;
Care of Personal, 72;
Beauty in the Human Form, 86;
Literature of, 136.
Bed, Time to go to, 255.
Beer, Root, 93.

Belle, a, must Row, Swim, Skate, and Ride, 224.

Belles of our Cities, Old, 149.

Bites of Insects on Children, 81.

Blackboards, 230.

Bleached by the Dawn, 97.

Blonde Hair, how to Make, 68;

Blonde Hair-pins, 261.

Blondes, Advice to, 20.

Blood, Mild Cider for Irritable, 240;

Dew-cool Air as a Blood Tonic, 97.

Bloom—

Almond, 65;

Decay of, 146.

Body, Nobility of the, 165.

Bonaparte, Princess Pauline—her Lovely Foot, 162.

Braces, 230;
Shoulder Braces, 38.
Braids, Matching, 258.
Brain—
Brain-work takes Food, 102;
the Brain Dependent on the Body, 167;
the Brain more Delicate than the Stomach, 256.

Bread, True, 99, 100.

Breakfasts, 98;

Christiana’s Breakfast, 98.

Breath—
an Offensive, 55;
how to Secure a Fragrant, 56.

Bust—

Development of the, 233;

Improving the, 234.

Calisthenics, 38.

Camphor for the Face, 172.

Carriage of Southern Women, 44.

Cascarilla Powder, 74.

Caution, a Needed, 235.

Cazenave’s, Dr., Composition for the Face, 73.

Celnart’s, Madame, Works of the Toilet, 134;

Recipe for Removing all Traces of Tobacco in the Breath, 156.

Chignons and Wigs, Changing, 257.

Chilblains, a Relief for, 190.

Children—
their Irritations, 121;
their Ways, 248, 249.

Chilliness is a Symptom of Diseases, 51.

Chills are Incipient Congestion, 52.

Christiana’s Looks, 96;
her Breakfast, 98.

Cider, Mild, for Irritable Blood, 240.

Cigars, People who Smoke too Many, 248.

Circulation, Charm of, 51.

Cleanliness means Health, 164.

Clergymen, Sensations of, 250.

Clothing, Paper, 52.

Coiffure, Arts of the, 138.

Cold Cream, 84.

Cologne, how to Make, 58.

Color, how to Procure Freshness of, 60.

Comedones, or Black Worms, how to Remove, 75.

Complexion—
how to Acquire a Clear, 13;
to Clear the, 17;

Preparations for Oily, 19;
how to Procure a Fine, 21;

Danger of Painting the, 69;

Rain-water as a Bath for the, 71;

Best Wash for the, 74;

Cure for Bad Effects of Sun and Wind on the, 80;
the Complexion Ruined by Fumes of Medicine, 85;

Iris Hues of the, 92;
what Complexion is the Sign of, 96:
Early Walks Improve the, 97;
Effect of Sunshine on the, 98;

Complexions Improved by Taking Sulphur Vapor-Baths, 130;
about Complexions, 192;

Complexion gives Trouble to Full-blooded Girls, 193;

Pure Blood Makes a Good, 199;
how to Dress with a Dull, 215;
Girls’ Complexions, 231;

Trouble with the Complexion in Cold Weather, 238;
how to Impart a Brilliant, 245;
the, 267.
Composers, a Nervous Opinion of, 248.
Congestions, Vapor-Bath Good for, 170.
Cooking, Proper, 99.
Corns—
Loose Shoes the Cause of, 190;
Soft, 191;
Remedies for, 191.
Corpulence, Danger of, 182.
Corpulency, Trials of, 177;
Turkish Baths for, 178.
Corsets—
about, 105;
Girdles more Needed than, 105;
Singing Scales with Corsets off, 232;
the Best, 233.
Cosmetic—
Artist, 87;
Gloves, 89, 245;
Cosmetic, 140;
Sultana’s, 144;
Milk of Roses as a, 153;
Cosmetics sometimes play Tricks, 194.
Crimping—
the Art of, 83;
does not Injure the Hair, 258;
Crimping-pins, 259;
Rubber Crimping-pins, 260.
Curl the Hair, how to, 84;
Curling Fluid, 28;
Curling-irons, 259.
Custom, 98.
Cuts, 80.
Dancers Eat, how, 102.
Dancing, 243.

Daughter’s Dressing, a Mother should Inspect her, 226.

Dawn, Bleached by the, 97.
Dentifrice—
Delicate, 57;
Standard, 143.
Depilatories, 32;
Cautions about, 128, 129.
Devices of Uneasy Age, 212.
Devonshire, Duchess of, 149.
Diet—
for Persons with Hepatic Spots, 173;
for Stout People, 180;
for Girls, 228.
Digestion, Food for Weak, 14.
Diseases—
Chilliness is a Symptom of, 51;
Eruptive, 80.
Dress—
how to, 219;
Poor Taste in, 220;
for Girls, 228;
for Flat Figures, 234.
Dresses for Girls, 233.
Dressing on Two Hundred a Year, 215.
Drinks—
Cooling, 20;
Summer, 92, 93.
Drowsy, go to Bed when you feel, 255.
Dwellings, about our, 209.
Dye—
a Harmless, 91;
how to Apply, 91;
French, 91;
Persian Blue-black, 270;
for White Eyebrows, 273.
Dyes—
for the Hair, 29;
for the Eyelashes and Eyebrows, 30;
for Theatricals, 34;
Chloride of Gold, 271;
Transient, 273.
Dyspepsia, Jealous Women have, 254.
Eat, how to, 102.
“Eau Angelique,” 157.
Editors, Sensations of, 250.
Eliot, George, on Complexions, 73.
Emotion, Training of, 151.
Enamel, Baking, 145.
Enigma of Love, the, 147.
Exercise—
to Develop the Arms, 231;
for Girls, 232;
Out-door, 251.
Expression is the Sign of, what, 95.
Eyebrows—
how to Grow, 90;
a Dye for White, 273.
Eyelashes and Eyebrows—
Dyeing the, 30;
Washes for, 34;
Trimmed and Brushed, 88;
how to Grow, 91.

Eyes Bright, Eating Sugar with Cologne on Makes the, 245.

Eyes, Dark, 122.
Face—
Means of Softening the, 19;
Making-up the, 61;
Compositions for the, 73;
Olive-oil and Tar for the, 120;
a Preparation for Whitening the, 145;
Pastes and Poultices for the, 172.
Faces—
Good for Irritable, 120;
Bleaching, 198;
Dull, Thin, 218;
School-girls’ Flushed, 243.
Faults, Common, 96.

Feelings, never Talk of a Girl’s, before Her, 230.

Feet—
Care of the, 40, 162;
Position of, when Standing, 40;
how to Keep the Feet Elastic, 42;
Painful Swelling of, 42;
how to Bathe the, 162;
Oil for the, 163.
Figure—
Erectness of the, 38;
the Proper Carriage of the, when Walking, 42;
what a Fine Figure must be, 225;
Care of the, after Nursing, 236.
Figures, Flat, 234.
Fine Arts, School of, 110.
Finger Thimbles, 124.
Finger-tips, Coloring of the, 66.
Flesh—
how to Reduce, 93;
Banting System for Reducing, 175;

Losing Flesh at the Rate of a Pound a Week, 182.

Folks, Older, to Join with the Children, 249.
Food—
for Weak Digestion, 14;
Brain-work takes, 102;
about our, 209.
Form—
Renovating the Outward, 12;
Beauty in the Human, 86.
Freckles—
Golden, 78;
how to Remove, 79.
Freckle Wash, 114.
French Dye, 91.
Frizzing the Hair, 259.
Frizzing-tongs, 259.
Gargle for the Mouth, 157.
Generation, a Low-toned, 247.
Girdle, a Linen, 105.
Girdles more Needed than Corsets, 105.
Girls—
Physical Education of, 224;
when Girls are Awkward, 227;
Bathing for, 227;
Diet for, 228;
Dress for, 228;
Exercise for, 232;
Care of Young, 235;
Delicacy due Young, 235.
Gloves, Cosmetic, 89;
Close-fitting, 243.
Grace—
the Secret of, 38;
how to Inspire a Girl with, 226;
in Women, Sign of, 234.
Gums, a Recipe for Diseased, 160.
Hair—
Black, how to Dye, 13;
Care of the, 22;
how to Cultivate Children’s, 23;
Washes, 24;
Means of Obtaining Luxuriant, 26;
when to Cut, 26;
German Method of Treating the, 27;
Curling Fluid for the, 28;
Oil for the, 28;
Dyes, 29, 189;
how to Treat Red, 31;
Superfluous, 32;
Growth of, 33;
how to Brush the, 33;
Hair Powders, 67;
to Darken the, 68;
how to make Blonde, 68;
Fashionable Gray, 82;

Preparation for Preventing the Sea-air from Turning the Hair Gray, 82;

Preparation for Restoring the Color of the, 82;
how to keep Hair Crimped or Curled, 83;
how to Curl the, 84;
Bather, 87;
Dressers, Amateur, 89;
a Wash to Stimulate the Growth of, 90;
Bleaching, 121, 263;
Removal of Hair on the Face, 125;
Removal of Superfluous, 125;
a Paste for Removing Hairs from the Face, 127;

Countries where Women have the Finest, 132;
Effect of the Sun on the, 138;
Burdock Wash for the, 186;
how to keep, from Coming Out, 187;
how to Restore Color to the, 188;
Dye, Cheapest and most Harmless, 189;
Restorer, Sperm-oil a, 189;
Hay-colored, 221;
how to Dress the, 221;
False, 257;
Changing the Color of the, 258;
Crimping does not Injure the, 258;
Light, should be Crimped, 258;
Dead, should be Pulled Out by the Roots, 258;
Frizzing the, 259;
Hair-pins, Blonde, 261;
Iron Hair-pins Hurt the Head, 261;
Cause of Light, 262;
what Colors, 262;
Foxy, 265;
how to Change Red and Flaxen, 271.
Hands, how to Soften the, 111, 243;
how to Whiten the, 112;
Bran Mittens for Whitening the, 172;
how to Secure Good, for Girls, 231;
Trouble with the, in Cold Weather, 238;
School-girls’ Flushed, 243;
for Removing Vegetable Stains from the, 244.
Harvey, Mr. William, 180;
Honors to Dr., 184.
Health, Cleanliness means, 164.
Heart Dependent on the Body, the, 167.
Hepatic Spots, Remedies for, 173.
High Living, Effects of, 125.
Homely Women, Hope for, 95.
Hours of Solitude, Reserve our, 149.
Hugo says, what Victor, 109.
Humors to the Surface, Drawing, 196.
Infant, do not Wash an, with Cheap Soap, 161.
Ink or Vegetable Stains, how to Remove, 112.
Insulators, Patent, 261.
Iris, Florentine, 138.
Italian Ladies, Habit of, 75.
Joints, to Restore Suppleness to the, 153.
Lacing, Arts of, 136.
Leaves are Full of Joy, 165.
Lecturers Eat, how, 102.
Linen, Écru, and White Nansook, 217.
Lip-Salve, 114.
Lips, Color for the, 67.
Looks, Woman’s, 247.
Love—
the Enigma of, 147;
the Love of Man, 147;
to Love and be Loved, 147;
Power of, over Man, 147;
Effect of, on Women, 148;
Miracle of, 148.
Madness, Brief, 249.
Magnificent, Easier to be, than Clean, 168.
“Making-up,” the Secrets of, 244.
Malmaison, Josephine of, 150.
Man Admires in Woman, what, 225.
Manners, Education in, 35.

Medicines for Women, the Great—Sunshine, Music, Work, and Sleep, 256.

Milk of Roses, 66, 153.

Mirrors, Advantages of Lining Rooms with, 221.

Moles, 33.

Montagu, Lady Mary, 75.

Montez, Lola, Recipe of, 154.

Mother, a, should Inspect her Daughter’s Dressing, 226.

Mothers—
a Word to, 109;

Prescription for Feeble, 211.

Mouth, Gargle for the, 157.

Murray’s Book, Lines from, 196.

Music—

Influence of, 148;

Women should Study, 252.

Musquito Bites, 81.

Nails—

Polishing the, 88;
how to give a Fine Color to the, 112;

Ingrowing, 163.

Nansook, White, 212.

Neck, a Preparation for Whitening the, 145.

Needle, how to hold a, Gracefully, 137.

Neighbors, Pulling our, to Pieces, 96.

Nerves, Woman’s, 247.

Nervous Prostration, Cure for, 13;

Nervous and Sanguine People, Diet for, 15.

Nets vs. Night-Caps, 25.

Neuralgia, Sulphur Vapor-Bath for, 130, 170.

Nose, Redness of the, 244.

Nose-Machine, a, 123.

Nursing, Care of the Figure after, 236.

Oil—
for the Hair, 28;
of Mace, 187.

Oils, Sweet, 153.

Ointment, Olive, 195.

Olive-Oil and Tar for the Face, 120.

Out-door Exercise, 251.

Padding, against, 233.

Paint and Powder, 59.

Painting the Complexion, Danger of, 69.

Paleness, Northern and Southern, 78.

Pallor, Shining, 77.

Paper as a Preventative against Chilliness, 52.

Parks and Balconies, in, 98.
Parties, Preparing for, 238.
Passions, how to Quiet our, 20.
Paste—
for Shoulders and Arms, 90;
for Removing Hairs from the Face, 127;
for Whitening the Arms, 128;
of Venus, 139;
Sulphur, 263.

Pastilles, Gray, for Purifying the Breath, 156.

Pàte, Bazin’s, 160.
Perfume—
of the Presence, 49;
how Arabian Women Perfume themselves, 131;
Perfumes, 141;
for the Body, 142;
Lost, 143;
of Spring, 149;
of the Bath, 159.
Perspiration—
Preparation for Profuse, 93;
Cure for Odor of the, 159;

Dangers Resulting from Suddenly Checking, 203.

Petrarch’s Laura, 88.

Physical Culture Urgent, 167.

Physical Education of Girls, 224.

Piano, Practice at the, 229.

Pimples—
a Recipe to Remove, 74;
are Disease, 239.

Pimple-Wash, 114.

Pomades, 25;

Southernwood, 29;

Almond, 84;

Mexican, 141.

Powder, 62;

Chalk, 63;

Cascarilla, 74, 242;

Bathing, 94.

Powder and Paint, 59.

Preparation for Profuse Perspiration, 93.

Presence, Perfume of the, 49.

Prime, Woman’s, 11.

Principals of Schools, a Word to, 109.

Prophylactic Fluid, 241.

Prostration, Cure for Nervous, 13.

Queen of England, the, uses Distilled Water for her Toilet, 169.

Races—

Grace of the Latin, 37;

Antique, 226.

Récamier’s Training, 70.

Recipes—
for Warm Days, 92;

Perfume, 139, 140, 141, 142.

Rheumatism, Good for, 170.

Rooms, Advantages of Lining, with Mirrors, 221.

Roses, Milk of, 66.
Rouge—
Tints of, 64;
Devoux French, 66.
Rusma, Oriental, 138.
Sallowness, how to Remove, 92.
Salve—
Lip, 114;
Toilet, 114.
Scalp, Preparations for Dry, 25.
Scrofulous Affections, Good for, 201.
Sea-Baths, a Substitute for, 55.
Shoe-Lining, 164.
Shoes, Tight, 41.
Shoulder—
Braces, 38;
how to Acquire Sloping Shoulders, 40;
a Paste for Arms and Shoulders, 90;
Device for Stiff Shoulders, 103.
Singers and Students, Diet for, 15;
how Singers Eat, 102;
Training of, 151;
Singing Scales with Corsets off, 232;
Singing, 251.
Situation, Accepting the, 214.
Skin—
Irritations of the, 20;
Prescription for the, 79;
Cure for Rough Skins from Yachting, 79;
Rough, 80;
Summer Irritations of the, 81;
Inflammation of the, 85;
for Improving the, 113;
how to Prolong the Freshness of the, 152;
Bran Cleanses the, 171;
a Recipe for Sunburned and Freckled, 192;
Cause of Rough, 193;
Effect of Consumption on the, 195.
Sleep—
the Remedy for Temper, 254;
Number of Hours to, 254;
People who Need Much, 255.
Soaps—
Quality of, 160;
do not use Cheap, 161;
Carbolic, 238.
Solitude, Reserve our Hours of, 149.
Southern Women, Carriage of, 44.
Southernwood Pomade, 29.
Spirits, how to Obtain Unfailing, 101.
Stains, how to Remove Ink or Vegetable, 112.
Still, a Small, 169.
Stippled Skin, Cure for, 18.
Stockings, how Often to Change, 163.

Stomach, to Maintain a Healthy Condition of the, 18.

Stout and Thin People, Food for, 16;
a Hint to Stout People, 93;
why People Grow Stout, 102.

Study, a Veto on Close, 229.

Superfluous Hair, 32.

Surgeon, a Wise, 180.

Swimming-School, Nervous Women should go to, 251.

Switches, Freshening, 265.

Tan-Wash, 114.

Tar, 195.

Tea, People who Drink Strong, 248.

Teeth—
for Decaying, 56;

Cleansing of the, 57;

Wash for the, 143.

Temper, how to Soothe the, 209;

Sleep the Remedy for, 254;

Heathen Tempers a Sign of Wrong Health, 254.

Theatricals, Dyes for, 34.

Thin and Stout People, Food for, 16.

Tint, a Brown, 91.

Tobacco in the Breath, Remedy for, 156.

Toilet—

Water, 58, 140;

Antique Toilet Arts, 60;
the Toilet a Profession, 87;

Influence of a Luxurious, 88;

Luxury of the, 88;

Artistic at the, 116;

Cares of the, 136;

Craft of the, 152;

Toilet Waters and Pastes, 161;

Distilled Water for the, 169;

Plain Women and Agreeable, 215.

Toothache, Recipe for the, 155.

Tooth-Wash, 158.

Towels, Bath, 54.

Training, Récamier’s, 70.

Tweezers, Roman, 126.

Typhoid Fever sometimes Caused by High Living, 126.

Ulcers, 80.

Unfeminine Traits, 108.

Vanities, Different, 109.

Vestris, Madame, 152.

Vitriol, Wash of, 76.

Wakefulness a Sign of Ill-Health, 255.

Walking in Relation to Health, 46.

Warm Days, Recipes for, 92.

Wash—
of Vitriol, 76;
to Stimulate the Growth of Hair, 90;
a Sand, 111;
for Tan, Freckles, Pimples, and Blotches, 114;
for Teeth or Hands, 143;
for Sunburned Skin, 242;
Glycerine, 242.
Water—
Toilet, 58, 140;
Distilling 168;
Distilled Water for the Toilet, 169.
Weak, how the, should Work, 253.
Wife, a Senator’s, 218.
Wigs, Blonde, for Theatricals, 68;
Wigs and Chignons, Changing, 257.
Willis, N. P., on Beauty, 48.
Woman—
her Business to be Beautiful, 9;
Woman’s Artists, 87, 88;
a Healthy Woman, 107;
the Loveliest Woman of France, 150;
Trials of a Plain, 185;
how a Homely Woman can make Herself Agreeable, 215;
what Man Admires in a, 225;
Woman’s Value in the World, 225;
a Woman’s Rule, 240;
Woman’s Looks and Nerves, 247.
Women—
Carriage of Southern, 44;
Hope for Homely, 95;

Transformation of Homely Women into Charming Beings, 95;

Sorrows of Ugly, 110;
Effect of Being in Love on, 148;
at and after Thirty, 150;
Counsel to Women of Thirty, 115;
Porcelain, 196;
what is to be Done with Weak, 196;
Plain Women and Agreeable Toilets, 215;
Sensations of Writing, 250;

Nervous Women should go to Swimming-School, 251;
why Women should Study Music, 252;
Jealous Women have Dyspepsia, 254;
why Women Need more Sleep than Men, 256;
the Secret of Content for most, 257.
Work—
a Nervous Person’s, is Fuss, 248;
how the Weak should, 253;
well done the Easiest, 253.
Worms—
Black, or Comedones, how to Remove, 75;
Flesh, 239.
Wrinkles—
a Kind of Varnish for, 75;
how to Ward off, 152;

Bread Paste and Court-Plaster to Conceal, 213.

THE END.

Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Page number references in the index are as published in the original publication and have not been checked for accuracy in this eBook.

Other spelling has also been retained as originally published except for the changes below.

Page 93: | “of sassafras drank” | “of sassafras drunk”
Page 121: | “for trés blondes” | “for très blondes”
Page 125: | “CHAPTER XI .” | “CHAPTER XII.”
Page 192: | “A southern lady” | “A Southern lady”
Page 217: | “its semi-tranparency” | “its semi-transparency”
Page 277: | “Washes for, ;” | “Washes for, 34;”

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Table of Contents

- THE UGLY-GIRL PAPERS;

- PREFACE.

- CONTENTS.

- THE UGLY-GIRL PAPERS.

- CHAPTER I.

- CHAPTER II.

- CHAPTER III.

- CHAPTER IV.

- CHAPTER V.

- CHAPTER VI.

- CHAPTER VII.

- CHAPTER VIII.

- CHAPTER IX.

- CHAPTER X.

- CHAPTER XI.

- CHAPTER XII.

- CHAPTER XIII.

- CHAPTER XIV.

- CHAPTER XV.

- CHAPTER XVI.

- CHAPTER XVII.

- CHAPTER XVIII.

- CHAPTER XIX.

- CHAPTER XX.

- CHAPTER XXI.

- CHAPTER XXII.

- CHAPTER XXIII.

- CHAPTER XXIV.

- CHAPTER XXV.

- CHAPTER XXVI.

- INDEX.

- Transcriber’s note

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE