Page images
PDF
EPUB

the daughter whose playing would not be highly regarded by those who understand classical melody, may still make the family very happy by her airs and variations and her simple songs.

Some of the fathers and mothers whose heads are growing gray remember when we used to sit down by the piano and sing "Nellie Was a Lady, Last Night She Died," "Maggie by My Side," "My Old Kentucky Home," "Rest for the Weary," and other sweet and somewhat sentimental songs which gave us a great deal of very innocent delight. I have seen a plain, hard-working man look exceedingly bored when a fine musician was rendering Mozart, Chopin and Schumann, simply because his ear and taste had not been educated up to the standard of the great composers, but he brightened up immensely when a little girl went to the piano and began merrily playing "Yankee Doodle" and "Hail Columbia." It is always worth while for children and young people to be entertaining to those who have passed the meridian, and it is an especially beautiful sight which we see when a father and daughter are in the best sense of the word "chums," understanding one another, and enjoying the pleasure their relationship brings.

A daughter is sometimes very thoughtless, and imposes burdens on her father which he should not have to bear. If he is rich and there is no need of her lending a hand in the support of herself or the family, it is quite right that she should take whatever he chooses to give her, but if in his long bearing of the burden and heat of the day he has not been able to accumulate a competence, it is not kind or daughterly in a young girl to add to his cares after she has reached maturity. She would very much better enter the ranks of the bread-winner and support herself.

I saw an instance of this sort of selfishness one day which went to my heart. The father was pallid and middle-aged, and rapidly growing old. He bore on his face the marks of evident care and anxiety. His pretty daughter hanging on his arm as he went away in the morning said: “ Now, papa, you will be sure to bring me that fifty dollars to-day for those furs when you come home, will you not?" He said: "Ethel, dear, papa will do his best, but he may not be able to let you have the furs this week." A cloud instautly settled on the pretty face, and the young girl, frowning and all her pleasure gone, exclaimed, "I never can have anything like other girls. I suppose it will be the same old story. There is never any money to spare for me. And if I cannot appear as well as the girls do with whom I go, I may as well settle down and be an old woman at once." The father went away with a heavy sigh.

A few days after I saw the young woman looking very dimpled, rosy and beautiful in her new furs. A business friend of the father said to me: "John will soon go to pieces; his family are too extravagant, and he has not the strength of

[graphic][merged small]

will to restrain them. in meeting his notes. are partly to blame."

He is borrowing money right and left and has great trouble
He will soon go under, and I am convinced that his family

Surely no daughter who loves her father will be willing to have such a record as this; to help ruin his business prospects and break him down in health and spirits. I am glad to know that such instances are exceptional, and that most young girls really enjoy entering the ranks of self-supporting women. Indeed, when I begin to think of all the bright and lovely, refined, and altogether charming young women I know who are supporting themselves, I am sure that on very few of them can rest the stigma of being selfish and thoughtless.

Sturdy and plump and clean and fair,
With big blue eyes and a tangle of hair,
There's a little lassie who runs to meet
Her father's step that rings on the street,
As, day after day, at the set of sun,
Father comes home when his work is done.

Making money for wife and weans,
Few are the sheaves the good man gleans;
All day long he is busy down-town,
Snowflakes sift where his hair was brown;
But he starts for home at an eager pace,
And love lights up the care-worn face.

For there at the window watching out
Is the little maid whose merry shout
Of" Daddy is here!" in his ear shall be
Swift as he turns his own latch-key.

And glad is the heart at the set of sun

When father goes home with his day's work done.

CHAPTER XXVI.

A Talk About Dress.

OOKIN KING over old fashion plates one cannot but be struck with the way in which history, so far as clothes are concerned, is forever repeating itself. Ten centuries ago, or for that matter twenty centuries ago, Orientals dressed exactly as they do now. The women in Rebekah's day covered themselves in veils, as they do to this hour, and the sheikh in the desert is dressed in 1898 as Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were, before the pyramids were built or Rameses passed away.

But Occidental fashions constantly change.

Wide skirts one year, narrow

ones next. Balloon sleeves to-day, tight sleeves to-morrow.

Poke bonnets and picture hats this season, cottage bonnets and trim toques next. Only nuns and Quakers wear anything like a uniform.

I was looking over a set of fashion plates this morning, and I saw a dame of the sixteenth century dressed in the identical costume we have worn this year. Frills, ruffles, waist, collar, sleeves, skirt, every detail of trimming are repeated in the gown and general effect of the toilette by our maidens and matrons now. The hat is just the same. The hand on the dial has completed the circle, and in the end of the nineteenth century we dress as women in good society did in Europe in the middle of the fifteenth.

A fanciful writer discovers some interesting points of resemblance between dress and architecture. Thus he tells us that "a house is a garment; it is raiment in stone or wood which we put on over our vesture of linen, wool, velvet or silk, for our better protection against weather; it is a second garb which must mould itself to the shape of the first, unless indeed it be the first that adapts itself to the necessities of the second.

"Are not, for example, the pictorial and emblazoned gowns, the cut-out, snipped-up costumes of the Middle Ages Gothic architecture of the most flamboyant kind, just as the more rude and simple fashions of the preceding period. belong to the rude and severe Roman style?

"When stone is cut and twisted and made to flash into magnificent sculptured efflorescence, the more supple textile fabric is cut and twisted and made to

[graphic][subsumed][merged small][merged small]
« PreviousContinue »