Our beautiful fashions go on improving! Like Buckingham Palace, they are constantly being altered, and never altered for the better. What the human _façade_ will be ultimately, there's no knowing. Everything has been tried in the shape of flowers, feathers, ornaments on the top, and, in some instances, paint, that could possibly disfigure it. Let these disfigurements only continue, and they may have the effect of converting the human head into a kind of MEDUSA'S, that will turn into stone all who look at it. One of the latest absurdities is the way in which ladies wear their bonnets--if it can be called wearing at all, when it is falling, like a Capuchin's hood, right down their backs. It thus forms a capital receptacle for collecting any refuse or rubbish that may be dropt, or thrown, into it. We know one lady who found her bonnet, when she got home, perfectly filled with dust. It was quite a dust-bin in a small way--and the luncheon, which was on the table at the time, had to be sent away, as everything was spoilt by the dusty shower that the lady had unconsciously shaken down upon it. There was another lady--whose husband is not so rich as he should be, and who grumbles fearfully, poor fellow, at every new bonnet he has to pay for--who discovered her _chapeau_ to be as full as it could hold of orange-peel. Some malicious little boys must have amused themselves in walking behind her and pitching into it every piece of orange-peel they found lying about. It was an amusing game of pitch-in-the-hole to them. The consequence has been that the lady, who is extremely particular, especially when she takes a new fancy like a new bonnet into her head, has been compelled to throw away her old bonnet, and to have a new one. The poor husband, who is really to be pitied (husbands generally are), has been obliged, in order to pay for the additional expense, to walk instead of riding, to give up smoking, and to cut off his luncheons--all of which expenses came out of his own pocket and not out of the housekeeping. The last time he was seen he was so thin that it was almost a microscopical effort to see him. But this absurd fashion, coupled with the other absurdity of long dresses, has the one good effect in keeping our streets clean, for the low bonnets carry off all the superfluous dust, and the long dresses carry away all the superfluous mud. [Illustration]