A fashion, not, it will be allowed, in the very best taste:--Up to 1853 or 1854, we find no innovation worthy of exciting our enthusiasm; it is only in the first days of the Second Empire that we can see a marked change. The straight Sunshades were then abandoned to introduce Sunshades with a folding stick, principally for those made in satin and in moire antique, bordered with trimmings or set off with streamers. These Sunshades were called "/à la Pompadour/," and they were worthy, in a certain degree, of the beauty who personified grace and delicate elegance in the eighteenth century; they were embroidered after the old fashion with gold and silk, and on the richness of the stuffs was cast or "frilled in" Chantilly, point d'Alençon, guipure, or blonde. The folding-sticks were of sculptured ivory, of carved mother-of-pearl, of rhinoceros horn, or of tortoise-shell. It is with this light Sunshade that the Parisian ladies saluted the Empress, caracoling by the side of the Emperor, at the commencement of his reign, on their return from the Wood, in the Champs Elysées, which began to look beautiful, as everything looks beautiful at the spring-tide of years, as well as at the springtime of governments. All in nature has surely its fall of the leaf, after having had the verdure of its blossom!--all tires, all passes, all breaks: men, kings, fashions, and peoples! The Sunshade is found to-day in the hands of every one, as it should be in this practical and utilitarian age. There is not, at the present hour, any woman or girl of the people, who has not her sunshade or her satin /en-tout-cas/--it seems to be the indispensable complement of the toilet for the promenade; and our modern painters have so well understood this gracious adjunct of feminine costume, that they take very good heed not to forget, in a study of a woman made in a full light, a rosy head with dishevelled hair, on the transparent ground of a Japanese Sunshade, thus producing an exquisite work with all freshness of colouring, and discreet shadows sifted upon sparkling eyes or a laughing mouth. On Sundays and holidays, in the jostlings of the crowd at suburban fêtes, it is like an eddy of Sunshades; such the spectacle of ancient besiegers, who covered themselves with their bucklers and made the "tortoise," so in the shimmer of the summer sun in the great Parisian parish festivals: gingerbread fairs of Saint-Cloud or Vaugirard, the Sunshade is on the trestles and among the promenaders; it protects equally the girl dancing on the tight-rope and the respectable citizen's wife in her Sunday best, who rumples the flounce of her petticoats in these popular gatherings. Surely the Sunshade adds new graces to woman! It is her outside weapon, which she bears boldly as a volunteer, either at her side, or inclined over her shoulder. It protects her head-dress, in supporting her carriage, it surrounds as with a halo the charms of her face.