Ladies Column.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume XX, Issue 2053, 8 April 1887, Page 2 (Supplement)

Ladies Column.

Cultured Seclusion.

Transplanted things have a hard time of it and to anyone with sympathy and imagination excite more regret than admiration in their new surroundings. It may be that the force of association is stronger than actual circumstances, and that, spurred by this association, we condemn what otherwise we should have found heart to praise. Take an edelweiss in a botanical garden—a single specimen bid to bud and flower for the grave exigencies of science counting petals and stamens, bracts, pistils and seeds, and examining the mysteries of cells and nerves through the microscope. The edelweiss is the same thing as we find it on the higher slopes of the Engandine—but what a difference there is in the sentiment with which we look at it! How fatally transplanted it seems to be 1 In its own home with what delicious circumstances and companions it is associated ! The rusty-leaved rhododendron glows like the crimson cheeks of a sunburned and bronzed gipsy. The gentian stars the grass with eyes of blue that outshine the heavens above, and sweet and waxen pyrolas, like hothouse flowers for grace and scent and fragile beauty, lie—the one as close as lawn grown daisies, the others, tall, upright, belled, like lillies of the valley touched with faint pink about their flowers.

The rich purple-brown and fragrant brav aelle can be had by those who seek : while tire white disks of the eight petalled dryas and the tender green of the small, quaintly ruffled astrantia ; largo pale-blue clematis; feathery thalictruras; huge fleshy leaved gentians yellow and purple and spotted; ladies’ slippers, snake colored in brown and yellow; sweet daphnes : campanulas of every shape and name ; with more than we care to count unless we would write a botanical cata-logue—-these are its associates within hailing distance, if not growing side by side, where now it is companioned with English cutweed and others of the same family—an exile from its own and a captive among strangers.

If this pathos of transplantation is true of flowers, so is it of persons. How often we see the changed life and ruined happiness of a follow creature because of that transplantation from the natural to uncongenial surroundings ! We need not to go to the Swiss for their well known nostalgia ; we have it in minor measure near at homo.

Take the country bred girl whose youth has been passed among the mountains, whore she was suffered to climb from the earliest years up to now. Free as a nymph of old, fearless as a creature ignorant of evil always is, trained to endure and to do like an Amazon leader of squadrons, she has cultivated her body, truth to say, somewhat at the expense of her mind. Biie is as healthy as the ideal savage and as free ; as fond of open air exercise as a man ; as hardy and as reaistent as an athlete. In an evil hour she falls in love with a city' man, and moves from her old new ones —new ones as unknown Wher as would be a snow storm to the scarlet hibiscus of Africa.

She comes to town and begins a life which has no more relation to her former experience than if she had been dreaming in one century, to be awakened twenty centuries after. For the vigorous mountain exercise of her unmarried days she has to substitute the two mile walk on the pavement and in streets, when she goes with her husband in the morning to his office. For the whole day passed in the open air she has to be brought down to settled, fixed and stated hours ; and for the free run of a garden where she dashed out at will, hatless, glovoless, shawllcss, she cannot go outside" her own dour unless dressed “ to the four pins” of the French phrase. Is she not transplanted even more sadly than the edelweiss or the hibiscus '! Her rich, fresh color pales, the superb splendor of her form fines down and diminishes ; her very hair seems to have lost the sun ; and the laughter which once made her blue eyes dunce is exchanged for the tears which spring unbidden, she does not know why.

Work for Women

To-day women aro found in the following trades, manufactures and professions: Artificial flowers, and leaves, awnings, bedding supplies, blank books, paper boxes, collars and cuffs, boys' clothing, buttons, brushes, canned goods, caps, cards, carpet sewers and weavers, cases for jcwclery, cigars and cigarettes, cloaks and suits, clothing, confectionery, copyists, cords and fringes, corsets, dressmaking, embroidery, envelopes, essences and extracts, fancy boxes and fans, felthers, flannel, tki"a, furs, gimps, gloves, gold leaf, hairdressers, handkerchiefs, hat sweats and trimmings, labels, laces, laundries, lead pencils, linen and laidies’ underwear, mats, mattresses, medicines, morocco goods, milliners, neckties, paper bags, parasols, patterns, perfumeries, pocket-books, pearl work, preserves, printing offices, quitters, rags, ribbons and ruffles, shirts, silk factories, soaps, slippers, straw goods, spices, tags and suits, suspenders, tassels, teachers, tickings, tobacco, toys, trimmings, twines, umbrellas, upholstery, watch oases, waxwork, weavers, white goods, wigs, willow ware, window shades, woollen goods, wrappers, worsted yarns, telegraphers, saleswomen, washers and miners. It would seem, with so many ways open that there is work for all who are obliged to earn their bread.

In (he Kitchen.

A pleasant kitchen is a cheerful, home like place, and I’m glad that decorative art is peeping into it at last, as well as in the parlor and the bedroom. The newest kitchen candlestick is uncommonly like its ancestral prototype. It has a base of a deep bowl form, extending upward at ono side and turning over in a point with a hook to hold the iargeconieal extinguisher, at the same lime forming a convenient handle, A large mplike rim sets of! the caudle and serves to catch the melted wax. Egg beaters wilh scroll handles, and eggboilers in antique repousse brass have appeared, and even the old-fashioned rol-ling-pin has borrowed a new gaiety from its relation, the bangle board', and has the ends of its handles carved or finished off with some sort of ornamental turn. Crumb brushes are mounted with brass of a im.‘di;eval design, ar.d crumbs are swept into a tray wilh a dragon handle. Curtains for kitchen windows of bright chintz and a, cushion of Turkey red calico for the cooks easy-chair add greatly to the brightness of the kitchen, that room which George Eliot liked “best of any in the house.” *