Ladies' Column.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 422, 13 March 1880, Page 3

Ladies' Column.

SUNSHINE AND SHADOW. Only a bank of weeds, of simple weeds, Of sweet wild thyme and yellow, scented broom, . ~, t Of tangled grass, and slender wmd-blown reeds, Of brown notched ferns and tall spiked foxglove bloom, And yet a world of beauty garners there, Bow-twittering birds, soft scents, and colors fair.

Only a narrow mound, a long, low mound, Snow-covered, 'neath a wintry, leaden sky, Unlit by moon or stars ; and all around Through bare, brown trees the night winds moan and sigh. # And yet a world of love lies buried there, Passion and pain, bright hopes and dull despair. Oh, golden bank, where sunbeams glint and play, ■. t i Bloom out in fragrance with a hundred flowers! „,.,., *_ , Oh, narrow mound, keep till the judgment-day The mournful secrets of these hearts of ours ! Then in God's light let joy and sorrow fade, For near His brightness both alike are shade.

A bracelet slipper is one of the latest novelties introduced in Pari?. The shoe is cut very low in front, and high up on the instep ; it is fastened with a finely chiselled real gold bracelet instead of the usual strap. Another expensive novelty in the same line is the Andalusian boot, made of black satin, with lace ruffles down the front seam, and fastened with real jewel buttons. The city of Paris has, says the Academy, opened seven new central schools of design for girls only. Education in drawiog has, as we have before stated, lately been made compulsory in France, and the means for acquiring it are therefore being extended in every direction. Among the candidates who passed the examination in medicine and midwifery at the College of Physicians in Ireland on Dec. 12 was Miss Eliza Foster MacDonough, who had previously studied for five years at Zurich, and there took the degree of M.D. in 1877, ■since which time and until recently she has been resident physician to the New Hospital for Women, Marylebone-road. Speaking of passing fancies, " Atlas," in the World, says: —Frequenters of picture private views in Bondon, have a new sensation this winter. Last season they mobbed beauty : now hiddeously-attired unkempt dowdiness provokes the stare. The prize for the new style seems generally awarded to a rhubarbcolored flannel ulster and a cart-wheel beaver hat, which pervaded both the private views •last week.

The tight cosume, which is the prevailing fashion amongst the. ladies just now, comes in for a good many sarcastic remarks at the hands of the male portion of the population. At a fashionable reception the other night, a charming girl had on such a tight-fitting dress that she had no room for a pocket, not even for her lace handkerchief. Some say, we know not with what truth, that when dresses are made so tight a dainty little pocket is made in the side of the shoe to admit of a few shillings for the evening, but how the fair wearer is to get at it is a problem we are unable to solve, seeing that when attired in a "tie-back" costume she cannot sit down, much less stoop, to get money out of her shoes. I have a word to the ladies, and I hope it will be taken seriously, but as it refers to an article of dress, I don't suppose for a moment that it will. I am very sorry to say, ladies, that you are becoming very much like the

Chinese. You are rapidly losing the graceful walk which characterises, or ought to characterise, you by wearing shoes and boots that do not at all suit you. Are you aware that out of a hundred women you will not find one who can exhibit a perfect foot ? instead of the toes being straight and shapely, the great toe being in a liae with the rest of the foot on its side, they are all squeezed together so as to make the great toe press on to an unsightly bunion ! What is the result of this ? Why, you have painful corns all over your feet, and walking becomes a labor of pain ! All this arises from high heels, and lately because it is the fashion to have your boots and shoes made to come to a point ! I wish Her Majesty the Queen or the Princess of Wales would set a different fashion. To walk in comfort you require a boot with a broad sole and with plenty of room for the toes. But, Sir, I know I might just as well ask the ladies to wear a bonnet of the fashion of 1876, as to ask them to wear anything no matter how comfortable, that is not precisely as Mr. Worthy or _ Mr. Somebody else known to fashion, ordains it. I have done my part, however, in warning you, dear ladies.—" Tipkins Thudd," in the Isle of Wight Times.

Mrs. Nancy Hanks Bincoln, mother of Abraham Bincoln, died in her husband's cabin inf Carter township, Spencer County, Indiana, sixty-one years ago last October, and_ was buried in an orchard near the present site of Bincoln city. On Thanksgiving Day the briars and tangled undergrowth were cut away from around the grave and a white marbh? shaft set up over the hitherto unmarked mound. The shaft bears the inscription, " Here lies the remains of Nancy Lincoln, mother of Abraham Bincoln, sixteenth President of the United States." In a recent number of the Scientific American the subject of belts is discussed in a way that reflects little credit upon that usually accurate and careful Journal. The writer's knowledge of the subject is evidently extremely superficial, and he totally ignores some of _the_ very gravest questions now under discussion in regard to belts. The belt, says this writer, must be able " to stand with little stretching the heaviest direct strain." This shows an entire misconception of the purpose of the belt. Very little strain comes upon it, for it is not worn with a view to compress the waist. The work of compression is done by certain intricate machinery concealed beneath the first superficial strata of clothing, and the belt is only drawn sufficiently tight to make sure that, in the words of the scientific writer, it " lies even and true." Throughout the article this mistaken theory that belts are worn excessively tight is constantly put possible that the writer has never noticed the fact that watches, handkerchiefs, and other small articles are frequently worn between the belt and the person of the wearer, a thing which would be impossible were the belt subjected to " the heaviest direct strain." This remarkable authority also asserts that " the best belt"—meaning, of course, the one that is worn on full-dress occasions-—"is that which combines the highest tensile strength with the greatest power to resist wear by attrition, being at the same time subject to little change by dryness, moisture, heat, or cold." IS'ow, the most superficial observer knows that a belt is subject to very little " attrition," in fact, is less subject to attrition than is probably any other feminine garment. The coat-sleeve rests against it with a steady uniformity of pressure, and though it is, of course, removed when the old gentleman comes into the room, and replaced when he retires, the attrition thereby produced is almost infinitesimal. As to the requirement that a belt should be unaffected by heat, moisture, &c, there might be some force in it were belts worn fey delicate scientific instruments instead of girls. The ordinary heat and moisture to which a belt is subjected are too unimportant to produce any effect upon it. Does the scientific writer really suppose that ladies wear leather belts when surfbathing, or that the heat of the human coatsleeve is sufficient to crisp or calcine leather ? — New York Times. WHO WAS SHE ? Of the many empty and ludicrous pretences consequent on the mock exclusiveness of modern society, none is more affected and impertinent than this inquiry. It is the last word of feminine snobbishness, the expiring groan of a maudlin gentility, the despairing pro test of a moribund aristocracy of fashion. Sometimes it is the mere mechanical repetition of # an idiotic cuckoo-cry. A gentleman appears in a drawing-room with a wife, who has something exceptionally to distinguish her in the way of appearance, dress, or manner. She happens to be a stranger to the company, and at once the question, asked with bated breath, goes round the room, •• Who was she ?" She is unknown to them. She is not of their set. Therefore the assumption is that she has fallen from the clouds, or belongs to a new order of humanity, or has been rescued from some abyss of obscurity, and is now for the first time introduced to the beatific vision of polite life. It is upon these occasions, and on these occasions only, that society shows itself not quite so barren of the imaginative faculty as it is usual represented. If the incognita has good looks and is well dressed, she ha 3 been discovered in some millinery show-room in Regentstreet. If she is bright and lively in conversation, she has been on the stage. If she has a touch of didacticism in her manner, she has been a governess. If, on the other hand, her manner is free and unembarrassed, she is a divorcee, or possibly worse. Given the phenomenon, or the personage, and society is at once ready to write the history. There are nineteen ladies in a room who know each other. A twentieth enters the apartment who knows, and is known to, none of the rest. Hence, the immediate conclusion, or the affectation of such a conclusion, that an embodied mystery is present, whose existence can be accounted for only by some of a legion of ingenious theories. It is a question that is always being asked

and answered in the world of English society —in the season or out of it—in the country house as well as the town mansion. " Quite an agreeable person," or " Quite good-looking," or clever or witty, or fast or slow, or whatever else it may be ; but—who was she ? Her husband has said nothing about her antecedents to a soul. All that the world knows is that he married a wife about a year ago ; that they have been travelling since ; and this is the result. So the maids and matrons whose names are written in the social stud-book hold counsel together, and discuss the new-comer. There is a rumor that she ha 3 a little money. In that case, the hypothesis that she was a destitute orphan—possibly a foundling—adopted by a moderately opulent uncle, commends itself to favor, and continues to find acceptance until some newer conjecture is introduced. A shrewd spinster, or a matured dowager of the company, experiences one fine morning a revelation on the subject. The inconnue is a daughter of the husband's old college tutor, to whom he was profoundly attached ; or she is the only child of a dead friend, the cost of whose education her lord and master has been defraying since her infancy, in order that he might bring up a wife moulded precisely to his own wish. If the gentleman is anything of an artist, he suddenly became enamored of her while sketching in a gallery at Florence ; if an invalid, she won his heart while nursing him through a dangerous illness. Whatever may be the inference most generally approved of, the one thing certain is, that if there be about her anything that specially challenges attraction, the question is not only asked in tones that are almost audible, but is answered, not indeed with any attempt at veracity, but in a manner strikingly illustrative of society's inventive aptitude. Idle as the interrogation may seem, it raises some practical reflections, and it furnishes a satire on some genuine shams. It is, in the first place, a question which insinuates a falsehood. It is based upon the affectation that society is still the exclusive affair which it was, and in which no one was actively engaged without being able to show a clearly ascertained pedigree, or definitely to claim relationship with the Somethings of Somewhere. This era has long passed away, but the delusion that it exists is even yet cherished. Society has become a mob, but the mob itself likes to think that it is after all an exclusive coterie. There might have been a reason for asking the " Who was she ?" question when a fair stranger appeared in the select drawing-rooms of the last century. There never could be a time when such a question was more preposterously inappropriate than coming from the lips of society at the present moment. The suppressed answer to the words " Who was she ?" is, of course, " A parvenue," and just now society is practically dominated by those whom the social queens of Bady Jersey's day would certainly have sneered at as parvenues. It is true that they pick up the prejudices and the airs as speedily as they do the jargon and the scandal of the oldest habitues. But imagine the inconvenience which they would sustain by a retort of the interrogation ! To a bystander, with any sense of humor and any memory, it is irresistibly laughable to hear the conventional " Who was she ?" asked by a dame, redolent of society's most improved airs, 'vhom he remembers not so many years ago as the model of the studio or the belle of a dancing saloon. Inquisitiveness is not considered to be a mark of good breeding ; in the present case it is equally little the token of good sense. Society can scarcely afford to be overnice at the present time ; an I if it is wise it will not suffer itself, out of the mere spirit of affectation, to ask inconvenient questions in too pointed a tone.