Before we approach the "sixties," with their extraordinary revival of the hoop or crinoline fashion, we must remark on the extraordinary fashion-plate promulgated for the year 1854. What would the ladies say to such a tyrannical dictate of fashion to-day? It is inconceivable now; but many a fair dame and damsel seeing it in that year must inwardly have quaked with terror at the prospect of facing her beloved Adolphus in Bloomerian garb. Happily, the prophets proved false for once, and the fashion passed away, just as a year or two ago the threatened crinoline scare passed away with us. Crinoline had to run its course although not before it had been guilty of many enormities, as will be seen by the appended plate. The ladies' heads herein appear but as the apexes of pyramids; and the singular cut of the bodices and the rotundity of the young ladies' skirts appear to us, in this age, ludicrous. [Illustration: CRINOLINE AT ITS ZENITH. 1865.] On the whole, it may be our vanity and self-sufficiency, or it may be our superior taste; but to us it seems (and we trust the reader, on comparing these fashion-plates of our grandmothers with the last of our series that for 1904--will agree with us) that however our past generations dressed, and whatever Worth and Paquin have in store for the future, our English girl of the present has decidedly the best of the sartorial bargain. [Illustration: SOMEWHAT NEATER THAN OUR GRANDMOTHERS (LADIES' FASHIONS FOR 1904). (By courtesy of Messrs. Weldons, Ltd.)] _A Willing Scape-Goat._ BY S. B. ROBINSON. Jack Selden only half suppressed an exclamation of angry despair by a simulated fit of coughing, as he read at breakfast the solitary letter that had fallen to his share from the mail-bag. It was not pleasant reading: it was a thinly-veiled command to pay, within three days, a card and betting debt to the tune of two hundred pounds. He raised his face, from which the colour had fled, and glanced furtively round at the other occupants of the table, as he crushed the letter into his pocket. His father, Dr. Selden, a tall, grey, ascetic-looking man--blind for some years through a disease of the optic nerve--had not noticed the exclamation; neither had Madge Westbrook, his _fiancée_, a handsome girl, who chanced to be too deeply occupied with her duties of hostess, in the absence of Miss Selden, the doctor's sister. Cyril Wayne, a fair, resolute-looking young fellow of Jack's age, the doctor's amanuensis, was the only one of the trio who had perceived the trouble.