Haggard Looks.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1036, 8 January 1892, Page 5

Haggard Looks.

People are apt to attribute haggard looks to mental activity, and to counsel impose and tranquility as a cosmetic. To the thoughtful traveller the falsity of this theory is obvious. It is in the country village, where the church meeting is the theatre, the post the excitement, the days weeks, and one can hear the cows breathe in the deathlike stillness, that the greatest number of sunken cheeks, wrinkled brows, leaden complexions., and lifeless exr pressions are to be seen among the women yet in their thirties., In the seething metropolis, living three lives and enjoying two are to be found scores of women — mothers or perhaps grandmothers possessing all the vitality, freshness, and much of the bloom of early youth. The fact is, it is not activity , but drowsiness, the presence of sleeping or dead thought in the soul, that is aging. Unvaried scenes, the repetition to-morrow of to-day, to-day of yesterday, this week of the preceding one, the ability to calculate exactly what each neighbour is doing at each hour of each day—the inevitable clock-like routine of conception, the monotony of existence, the utter weariness of an empty think-tank, that saps the vernal springs of life and creates decay in the face. Past grief, old angers, revenges, even past pleasures dwelt upon —all dead, decaying or decayed, thought—make a

sepulchre of the soul, a cemetery of the body, and a weather-beaten monument of the face. This is age.