HAIR-PINS.

Observer, Volume 2, Issue 33, 30 April 1881, Page 352

HAIR-PINS.

The hair-pin rarely makes its appearance until a girl lias reached her fourteenth year. From that time onward every healthy girl abounds in hair-pins, and a girl without a hair-pin is the rarest freak of nature. The most obvious use of the hair-pin is to fasten the hair to the head of the wearer. The hack hair is always spiked on with from six to twelve hair-pins, which hold it so firmly that it cannot be detached until all the hair-pins are withdrawn. In like

r manner the "bonnet is pinned to the hair with hair-pins. Unlearned men have often wondered how it was possible for a light straw hat to keep its place on the very summit of a pyramid of hair, from which the slightest breeze ought, apparently, to he able to blow it. The hair-pin is the solution of that mystery ; being made of the finest quality of "wrought iron, and strengthened by paint with as much care as the elevated railroad piers, it can defy anything but a cyclone ; and a bonnet fastened with half-a-dozen hair-pins becomes as much a part of the wearer as her back hair. But there are many other uses to which the hair-pin can be put. * It is an excellent buttonhook. The man who is within reach of an obliging girl can always button his gaiters and fasten his gloves with the aid of a hair-piu, and is thus freed from that slavish dependence on button-hooks which is otherwise the inevitable fate of the mau who wears buttoned gaiters. Women also use the hair-pin as a substitute for a gimlet. When a woman wishes to make a hole through a piece of cloth or pasteboard, she always disinters a hair-pin, and with it quickly accomplishes her purpose. Two hairpins properly bent form an admirable substitute for a clasp or buckle, and it is said that there are certain articles of dress in the shape of narrow bands fastened with a metallic clasp from which the clasp is frequently lost, and which would thus be entirely riseless were it not that the place of the missing clasp can always be quickly supplied by a pair of bent hair-pins. The hair-pin is also an admirable thing with which to mix medicine or stir lemonade. Two or three hair-pins held closely together may be used to beat eggs with great success, and there are many housekeepers who prefer them to many of the patent egg-beaters now in use. Where palm-leaf fans are used the hair-pin is mightier than the lead-pencil. An intelligent young lady can write a beautiful note _on the surface of a palm-leaf fan with the point of a hair-pin, and carry on an important correspondence with the young man in the next pew by handing him lier fan while the sermon is in

• progress. There are cases on record of letters having been hoisted up to the second and third stories of a female seminary by cords furnished with extemporised hooks made of hair-pins ; in fact, any school-girl, if furnished with a single hair-pin, can manage to communicate with a prohibited cousin m spite of almost any obstacle. As a pick-lock the hair-pin is simply invaluable, as it will accommodate itself to the wards of any ordinary lock. A more important use, however, is that which the smoker makes of a hair-pin ; he finds it the very thing he needs for coaxing the cigars of his native State to "draw," and no man who smokes a pipe can possibly dispense with it. All pipes will at time s become choked, and when this is the case a hairpin is the only thing that will remove the obstruction. There was a determined woman Avho once attempted to force her husband to give up smoking a pipe by cutting her hair short, and thus extirpating her hair-pins.