with a kind of superstitious awe. Only a year ago my
daughter Jenny had smooth dark hair, which she wreathed in various
soft, flowing lines about her face, and confined in a classical knot
on the back of her head. Jenny had rather a talent for coiffure, and
the arrangement of her hair was one of my little artistic delights.
She always had something there,--a leaf, a spray, a bud or blossom,
that looked fresh, and had a sort of poetical grace of its own.

But in a gradual way all this has been changing. Jenny's hair first
became slightly wavy, then curly, finally frizzly, presenting a
tumbled and twisted appearance, which gave me great inward concern;
but when I spoke upon the subject I was always laughingly silenced
with the definitive settling remark: "Oh, it's the fashion, papa!
Everybody wears it so."

I particularly objected to the change on my own small account, because
the smooth, breakfast-table coiffure, which I had always so much
enjoyed, was now often exchanged for a peculiarly bristling
appearance; the hair being variously twisted, tortured, woven, and
wound, without the least view to immediate beauty or grace. But all
this, I was informed, was the necessary means towards crimping for
some evening display of a more elaborate nature than usual.

Mrs. Crowfield and myself are not party-goers by profession, but Jenny
insists on our going out at least once or twice in a season, just, as
she says, to keep up with the progress of society; and at these times
I have been struck with frequent surprise by the general untidiness
which appeared to have come over the heads of all my female friends. I
know, of course, that I am only a poor, ignorant, bewildered man
creature; but to my uninitiated eyes they looked as if they had all,
after a very restless and perturbed sleep, come out of bed without
smoothing their tumbled and disordered locks. Then, every young lady,
without exception, seemed to have one kind of hair, and that the kind
which was rather suggestive of the term "woolly." Every sort of wild
abandon of frowzy locks seemed to be in vogue; in some cases the hair
appearing to my vision nothing but a confused snarl, in which
glittered tinklers, spangles, and bits of tinsel, and from which waved
long pennants and streamers of different colored ribbons.

I was in fact very greatly embarrassed by my first meeting with some
very charming girls, whom I thought I knew as familiarly as my own
daughter Jenny, and whos