Somewhat along this line of popular belief comes that pretty fiction about "the traces of a woman's hand." It is a minor myth, but very dear to us. We imagine that a woman--any woman--just because she is a woman, has an artistic touch, an æsthetic sense, by means of which she can cure ugliness as kings were supposed to cure scrofula, by the laying on of hands. We find this feelingly alluded to in fiction where some lonely miner, coming to his uncared-for cabin, discovers a flower pot, a birdcage and a tidy, and delightedly proclaims--"A woman has been here." He thinks it is beautiful because it is feminine--a sexuo-æsthetic confusion common to all animals. The beauty-sense, as appealed to by sex-distinctions, is a strange field of study. The varied forms of crests, combs, wattles, callosities of blue and crimson, and the like, with which one sex attracts the other, are interesting to follow; but they do not appeal to the cultivated sense of beauty. Beauty--beauty of sky and sea, of flower and shell, of all true works of art--has nothing to do with sex. When you turn admiring eyes on the work of those who _have_ beautified the world for us; on the immortal marbles and mosaics, vessels of gold and glass, on building and carving and modelling and painting; the enduring beauty of the rugs and shawls of India, the rich embroideries of Japan, you do not find in the great record of world-beauty such conspicuous traces of a woman's hand. Then study real beauty in the home--any home--all homes. There are women in our farm-houses--women who painfully strive to produce beauty in many forms; crocheted, knitted, crazy-quilted, sewed together, stuck together, made of wax; made--of all awful things--of the hair of the dead! Here are traces of a woman's hand beyond dispute, but is it beauty? Through the hands of women, with their delighted approval, pours the stream of fashion without check. Fashion in furniture, fashion in china and glass, fashion in decoration, fashion in clothing. What miracle does "a woman's hand" work on this varying flood of change? The woman is as pleased with black horsehair as with magenta reps; she is equally contented with "anti-macassars" as with sofa-cushions, if these things are fashionable. Her "old Canton" is relegated to the garret when "French China" of unbroken white comes in; and then brought down again in triumph when the modern goes out and the antique comes in again.