gentleman will soon be counted among the “rare and curious” specimens of the race. The mother who was _not_ “married at sixteen,” will ere long be a remarkable prodigy, and the paterfamilias who never explains that he “made an unfortunate marriage when quite a boy,” will rank beside her as a companion phenomenon. We have only to scan the pages of those periodicals which cater specially for fashionable folk, to see what a frantic dread of age pervades all classes of pleasure-loving society. The innumerable nostrums for removing wrinkles, massaging or “steaming” the complexion, the “coverings” for thin hair, the “rays,” of gold or copper or auburn, which are cunningly contrived for grey, or to use the more polite word, “faded,” tresses, the great army of manicurists, masseurs and “beauty-specialists,” who, in the most clever way, manage to make comfortable incomes out of the general panic which apparently prevails among their patrons at the inflexible, unstoppable march of Time,--all these things are striking proofs of the constant desperate fight kept up by a large and foolish majority against the laws of God and of Nature. Nor is the category confined to persons of admittedly weak intellect, as might readily be imagined, for just as the sapient Mr. Andrew Lang has almost been convicted of a hesitating faith in magic crystals, (God save him!) so are the names of many men, eminent in scholarship and politics, “down on the list” of the dyer, the steamer, the padder, the muscle-improver, the nail-polisher, the wrinkle-remover, and the eye-embellisher. Which facts, though apparently trivial, are so many brief hints of a “giving” in the masculine stamina. “It is but foolery; but it is such a kind of gain-giving as would perhaps trouble a woman.” Vide _Hamlet_. Such it may be,--let us hope that such it is.