AS SEEN THE ON WOMAN'S EYES

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXII, Issue XVI, 22 April 1899, Page 544

AS SEEN THE ON WOMAN'S EYES

WOMAN’S CROWN OF GLORY. (By Annetta Halliday-Antona.) Brush it and again brush it. This is the beginning and the end of the admonition. Not for you, few gills, who have maids to smooth your hair night and morning; but for many girls, good, sweet, wholesome, everyday girls, who are responsible for your own goodness and who wrestle with your own straight or curly tresses. Brush it. So shall ycur hair be clean and silky. No amount of combing will make it either. Look well to your brush--no wire brush, no heavy, silk-backcd brush, but even, well-chosen bristles. ABUNDANT HAIR A RESPONSIBILITY. Abundant hair is an ornament, but it is a responsibility. A woman’s crown of glory is apt to be a very dirty diadem. There is no Justcatcher equal to a great shock of hair. Every flying particle lodges in the flowing tresses that the poets rave over, and sifts down from silken thread, whether the locks be brown or gold. If your hair is dull in colour, wiry in texture, and will not catch the burnished gleam of the last rhyme you read, brush it. If your 'nair is fretful and peevish, brash it till it smiles and behaves with docility under the comb again. Wash it first. Beat an egg into foam, rub il well into the roots, thoroughly but gently; then rinse it in lukewarm water; keep a small brush for the purpose—a nailbrush or a toothbrush will answer—and part your hair, strand by strand, until you have cleansed the scalp well over. If your hair is moist by nature, dissolve a little borax and glycerine only, lest the head, after so much manipulation, feels uneasy or sore. Find an airy place—in the sun, of the day be not too warm—and brush the wet hair dry. Brush it caressingly with a soft brush till the moisture is nearly expelled. Then stop petting it and brush briskly with a stiff brush till it is satiny and dry. Did it ever occur to you that the scalp wants exercise aiid gets very little? The hair fades, sometimes tuirns white, grows rough and disobedient because it is not fed. Direct a fuller flow of blood to the hair follicles, and they will eat and grow young. CARE OF THE HAIR AT NIHGT.

At bedtime unfasten your hair and brush it. Brush it half an hour every evening for a month; after that, brush it fifteep minutes nightly —ten minutes, if you have no more time. Loosen it completely, rub it with your fingers, rubbing and brushing alternately, using, as before, first a soft, soothing brush, then a vigorous, stiff one. Brush it to the tips of the longest strands, (lather it loosely for the night, allowing full ventilation, and in the morning brush it fifteen minutes at first, afterward ten minutes, devotedly every day. If your hair is thin and threatens to fall, or the parting is growing inconveniently wide, let it down at night and massage the scalp. Rub it, gather the loose skin between the fingers, pinch it a little, invent exercise for it with the tip of the fingers. Give it some work to do every day, and brush it. Part it on the side at night and give the day’s parting a rest. No treatment of this sort prodines sudden or spectacular result, but it there is no disease of the hair follicles and the general health is good, it will often work wonders in a twelvemonth. Once in a couple of months—more often or less, as you find your need —go to a good hairdresser, who will run your locks, tress by tress, through a comb, snip ping the broken or split hairs and

leaving healthy, growing ends. No indiscriminate chopping at the end of a braid with rash, amateur scissors will produce results of much value.

IN THE NURSERY. A SCHEME AT ONCE DECORATIVE AND INSTRUCTIVE. Children never need weary of their surroundings if the furniture in the nursery be changed about now and then, and the pictures on the walls be removed for others. Here is a good idea, whereby coloured pictures or inexpensive photogravures may be changed as often as liked, though the frames remain permanent: — Take two lengths of picture moulding, each about three feet long, and tack them to the wall a foot apart, the lowest being about three feet from the ground. Before nailing place three small blocks behind the upper one to obtain sufficient space between it and the wall to slip in glass behind it.

If desired, a piece of the moulding may be fitted at each end. This makes a permanent frame, in which the pictures may be changed as often as is desired, and being low they are within easy view of the children.

Probably, a handy carpenter would charge only a trifle to fix a kind of dado of frames to the room, allowing different sizes and removable divisions, so that a large variety of pictures could be inserted at will. The children should be taught to name the various objects in the pictures, and to talk about and interest themselves in them. WHERE SHOULD A MAN PROPOSE. SOME SUGGESTIONS. Where should a man propose? Out of doors? out walking? in a romantic situation, under a tree, or by a river? or, prosaically, in a comfortable room, with a good fire close at hand? Should he ask the fatal question at a dance, with a risk of her next partner arriving on the scene before he has well secured his answer? or should he choose a picnic, with the danger of a shower of rain descending to damp his ardour? Should he ask her at tennis, when they are collecting the balls for the next set? or when they are walking home from church on Sunday evening, and linger a little way' behind everybody eles?

Perhaps the proposal in ‘Good Wives,’ where the professor asks Joe under the umbrella, is one of the least romantically-surrounded proposals in fiction, and yet we are told that Joe never saw any lack of romance in it.

It is more impossible to tell a man where he is to propose than it would even be to tell him whether his proposal will be accepted. A sensible man will make his opportunity, and a less gifted man can surely take one when he sees it at hand.

Unfortunately the opportunities that sometimes look the best don’t always prove themselves so in the end. I’erhaps, after a good long experience in the matter, a man gets to know exactly where a proposal ought to be made, and when to make it. But then the majority of women are apt to prefer a man who has not too large a past experience in these matters.

Some men solve the problem as to where they shall propose by putting their vows of devotion on paper, and sending them through the post. This is certainly one solution of the difficulty; but it is not, perhaps, the best. There is a certain preference in the minds of most girls for a viva voce proposal. After all, ‘I love you; will you marry me?’ looks so cold and bald on paper, compared with what it sounds when spoken by the man

one loves best in the whole world. If a man knew what infinitely greater weight the spoken declaration carries than the written one can ever do he would refrain from putting pen to paper on the subject, unless in case of necessity. As a rule, a man makes his opportunity for proposing when he is pretty certain of being secure from interruption. Nothing is more trying for both parties concerned than a proposal broken off short in the middle, so to speak.

Well does the writer remember a ease of this sort in her own experience, when one interruption after another prolonged that awful proposal to a length which excited fancy seemed to measure by centuries rather than minutes, and a hysterical doubt began to dawn as to whether the end of the W’orld would arrive and find that distracted gentleman still proposing! So let the place be ehosen with at least an eye to getting out the fatal words, and receiving an answer before the chance is abruptly taken from you, and you have painfully to begin from the very beginning, and work up to the point once more.

THE SLEEP CURE. WOMEN WITH ‘NERVES’ SHOULD TAKE AN OCCASIONAL DAY IN BED. Every now and then someone discovers that to take a rest every afternoon, or a day in bed once a week, is the most wonderful beauty cure imaginable. But this has been done for ages, and is being done now, and for years past one of the safest and surest cures for worn-out women has been a retreat to a nursing home, where, far from the stress of daily life and little worries, women are able to take a real long rest. Nervous diseases among women are becoming more and more common, for though the woman of to-day has many advantages her grandmother did not have, sleep no longer comes so easily as nature’s gift to her; it has to be wooed with nostrums. Nor can nerves be kept quiet and normal without the aid of innumerable tonics. But, at any rate, should it be proved so, we modern women have a hundred ways of combating nerve worry to the one or two known to our grandmothers. Our bicycles, recreation, rest, all tell favourably—much more so. indeed, than drugs. WHAT IS THERE LEFT? DOCTORS SAY YOU MUST NOT EAT THESE THINGS. My doctor says one should eat little or no meat, for it heats the blood, overtasks the system, and does one a lot of harm. It is well to eat very little, if any, bread, and if you must eat it, then eat it toasted. Vegetables contain little nutriment, and so they are better left untouched.

Fruit, according to at least one prominent authority, who has written a book on the subject, is fit to be eaten only by 7 those who live in the tropical climate, where fruit grows to nearly a perfect condition. In temperate zones it contains so much acid that it brings ruin to the digestive organs, causing dyspepsia. Nuts should never be seen on the table; they contain too much oil and are hard to digest. Cheese and the products of milk are unhealthy to an extreme. As a food, cheese must absolutely be avoided. Fish makes poor blood; in fact, a man cannot eat fish only and remain in health.

The foregoing facts have been condensed from what one has heard and read. Will someone kindly say what poor rudderless housekeepers ought to provide now that everything seems more or less tabooed?