The table and its secrets--Combs--Patch boxes--Enamelled objects--Perfume boxes and holders--Dressing cases--Scratchbacks--Toilet chatelaines--Locks of hair--Jewel cabinets. The mysteries of the toilet table are sometimes revealed in the curious furnishings of the dressing-room. The numerous accessories which are purchased from the beauty specialist, and as the result of speciously worded and attractively illustrated advertisements, in the present day, indicate that it is not at all unlikely that the fashions of all ages have demanded a plentiful supply of toilet requisites in order that the Society beauty might vie with her nearest rival. The curio collector is not so much concerned with the cosmetics, salves, pomades, and hair washes and dyes, the use of which has called forth receptacles for them, as with the choice boxes, cases, and implements of the tonsorial art which their use involved. To search for such things and to secure some hitherto unknown instrument or receptacle is ever the ambition of the energetic curio hunter. The field is large enough, for such curios are found in the tombs of the prehistoric dead, and among the household gods of the primitive savage in the few remaining unexplored inhabited countries to-day. Such objects may with a fair prospect of success be looked for among the relics of Assyrian and Egyptian races, and among the bronze curios of Ancient Greece and Rome; and excavations reveal relics of Saxon and mediaeval England among the ruins which have been covered up for centuries. Coming down the ages, the mysteries of the toilet table, as pictured in the not always refined engravings of the copper-plate artists of a century or so ago, tell of habits and conditions prevailing among the ladies of Society then which would hardly be deemed polite and refined now. Ladies who used patches and cosmetics and dressed their hair in such a mode that it was rarely let down and brushed, needed many accessories now obsolete. Moreover, the gradual change which passed over Society, and the privacy of the modern toilet as compared with the days when much that is now deemed curious and antique was in common use, has brought about a new order of things, and made other trinkets than patch, powder, and salve boxes acceptable gifts between lovers; hence we scarcely realize the sentiment that induced the donors of toilet requisites to bestow them on the ladies of their choice, or the recipients to welcome some of the curios obviously given from sentimental motives.