Latterly, I must confess, the mysteries of the toilet rites have impressed me with a kind of superstitious awe. Only a year ago my daughter Jennie 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. Jennie 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. Jennie's hair first became slightly wavy, then curly, finally frizzy, 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: "O, 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 Jennie 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.