Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 April 1887 — WOMAN’S DEPARTMENT. [ARTICLE]

WOMAN’S DEPARTMENT.

An Interesting Batch of Gossip for the Entertainment of the Fair Sex. Notes on House Decoration—A Glance at the Fashions —k Home Peril.

BY ANNIE E. MYERS.

For the House. No enterprising housekeeper but has her ®oul tried devising new and novel features for her domain. At the present day furniture as well as dress must submit to the dictates of fashion, and her decrees are so varied that it is often a fatiguing undertaking to furnish a house both practically and •tastefully. A level-headed womwi will go calmly and unexcitedly about it. Decide in the first place that even an unpretentious house can not be decked out in a hurry. Each article must receive deliberate and almost prayerful attention. Tradition to the contrary, no woman likes to go through the shops merely for inspection. It is much pleasanter to always purchase. The clerks seem to recognize intuitively her character. They pay her the barest civilities; they consider her their most despicable enemy, and have no hesitancy in letting her know the fact. They are always busy when she comes near them, and telegraph her approach to less well-informed but sympathizing coadjutors. But a woman bent on a wholesome purpose will not mind a little thing like that. She will patiently inform herself of what is in the market, she will make and study combinations of color and shapes, and not purchase until she is sure she has what she needs. Each season there iomes some especial feature. At one time it was brass, again stained glass or inlaid floors. For the moment they were the feature. Just now it is carved furniture. To be in style you must have a piece of it of some kind or description. Carved furniture is so adaptable to most styles of decoration that it is acknowledged to be the most useful for many purposes. Carved oak cabinets for reception- looms, carved buffets for drawing-rooms, and dainty little carved writing-tables or desks for ladies’ boudoirs or drawing-rooms are most sightly. Of course, the greatest luxury may be displayed in it. and various kinds of beautiful foreign, Indian and Canadian, combined with English, woods are utilized. Many exhibitions show articles of every kind in it for houses of modern luxury and refinement, making an effect equal to the elegant marqueterie of ancient days. But there are as well less expensive and quite beautiful articles that middle-class houses may aspire to possess. Pretty shelves and cabinets with simply the edges carved, when finished with a brass rod on which run rings suspending silk curtains, behind which glimmers an article or two of bric-a-brac, are often seen. Strongly made chairs of unique design are also carved and not expensive. Thayi come with cane seats and backs and are ornamental in any room, but particularly so in halls and dining-rooms. In upholstered furniture, Turkish designs are obsolete, and the tapestry covers are ? laced over cushions held in carved frames. his brings us to the simplest of carved ornaments, mirror and picture frames. Many ladies who have made more or less of a study of wood-carving in an amateur way are providing themselves with these to their great satisfaction. They often further add to the effectiveness of their work by covering some of the raised birds or flowers with gilt. This taste is questionable, although much admired, particularly with walnut wood. With this craze for carving the use of tapestry is more resorted to by housekeepers than ever. Woolen tapestry drapes the windows, and portions of it look charmingly rich in otherwise plainly furnished rooms. In combination with high-toned plushes nothing can be handsomer. But they are most expensive, and as the season advances they can not be comfortable or appropriate. However, these tapestry designs come in lighter materials, even in airy scrim, and at, moderate prices within the reach of all. The dark-indigo blues and Oriental reds and , yellows are faithfully reproduced in yard-wide scrim at fifteen cents per yard. Tidies, the solace of many an idle life, are handsomest embroidered in tapestry designs and solars. They have completely superseded tidies in crochet or lace. With these rich colors much gold embroidery is employed. These pieces of ornamental needlework are often used as covers temporarily tacked over satin or any plain colored chair seat or back. Gentlemen who have considered these little pieces tne nuisances of their parlor lives are delighted with this resort to positive facts in positions. A Home Peril. Of all social failings discourtesy is the most fatal and most common. Husbands speak roughly to their wives, and wives “nap” their husbands; brothers are rude, and sisters are tyrannical; all oppose, contradict, annoy one another,and no one thinks it incumbent upon him or her to keep that check on the temper, and that padlock on the lips, which would be a matter of obligation if a stranger were present. Though there would be infinite distress—mourning and lamentation unspeakable—should one of the cross-grewned brood die, says the Home Journal, there is a general atmosphere of storm, threatened or broken loose, which makes living in such a home damaging to the character and distressful to the sensibilities. Here comes in the advantage of discipline and the value of wise authority. Here comes in, contrariwise, the evils of this modem laxity, this abrogation of authority, when parents have let the reins drop from their hands, and discipline —not tyranny, not undue coercion, but the moral pressure which is the result of experience and knowledge—is as effete as the dodo. We shall not do better in the next generation, and we shall have to wait now for the time when some great religious passion or national emotion shall knit society together again and restore the essential spirit of discipline by the coherent force of a cause, an idea, a faith. Here is where religion, when sincere and personally applied, is so valuable. It supplies the motive for self-control, the obligation for that patience and forbearance with each other which cre-

ates sweetness of temper and courtesy of manner. And here it is that irreligion is so hurtful when people have not enough moral force to supply, by self-respect and consideration for others, that absolute control over their baser natures which has been lost by abjuration of authority. Those who have taken to heart the sweet and tender precepts of Christianity would necessarily be courteous, gentle, of patient temper, of complying ways. And if, unfortunately, a great deal of what is called piety exhales itself in formalism here and barren dogmas there, the residuum turns its precepts into practice, and that divine peace which reigns within has its expression without and the radiance of the home matches the sunshine of the heart. Young wives and husbands cannot be too strongly reminded of the probable shipwreck they will make of their happiness if they yield to that ill-temper which expresses itself in discourtesy, want of compliance, unnecessary opposition, and above all, that most disastrous amusement of “nagging” and creating a row. Hundreds of households have gone wrong for the mere want of checking in time the habit of annoying as a relief to the momentary feeling of irritation or discomfort. The wife who gets into the way of contradicting, of “checking” her husband, or opposing him in small things and standing out in large ones—the husband, who is sneering, contemptuous, tyrannical, fault-finding—perhaps neither side knowing the whole extent of its folly, but just giving way to it as more easy than to fight and conquer it—these young people are doing their best to dig the grave of their married peace, and some day poor, pale, failing little love will fall into it, stark and plumeless, and will never rise to life again. In . the beginning these little tiffs and discomforts are made up with a kiss from him and a few tears from her to add cement to the reconciliation. By time the tiffs are more acrid and the reconciliation is less warm. By still further time this never comes in at all, and things get into that chronic state when there is never an open breach and never a formal healing, but an ever-widening rift and a qever-ending coldness. Then the two lives jar and grind like rusty hingeß—locks which misfit the slots; wheels where the axle is stiff—or anything else which should work together in harmony and smoothness, but which, for want of care to keep the adjustment exact (perhaps for want of oil to the joints), creak and chafe and hang and do not fit, to the annoyance, and more, of all the bystanders.

Little Women. All the fashions tend to make women look taller, all the pompadour styles are being revived, and the coquettishness of that era adapts itself only to the small women. Beautiful giantesses are not the vogue, and the time of the tiny creation has come at last. Of course she triumphs —a little woman oonld not resist that; of course, gawky, horsey, and all the other abominable adjectives that can be applied to big women, are in her possession, and she delights in using them. She goes in for being immensely innocent, and would seem to have followed the advice given in a French journal, of which this only is remembered: “Look confident and indifferent; express your s«SL.simply, and with a voice as sweet as possible; be keenly alive to everything that yet appear absent minded; know ajjhipuch as possible, yet please by asking questions. Having read everything, quote nothing; seen everything, appear ignorant; heard all, always express surprise; desiring everything, ask for nothing. Be light hearted; preserve your beauty; be indulgent, to attract sympathy. Do not force wit; always listen attentively; be charitable for your own satisfaction. See things at a glance; judge quickly, and think more quickly still, in order to keep a cool head.” There is an immense amount of wisdom in all this advice, which, singular as it may seem, appeared, I believe, in “La Vie Parisienne.” It takes a Frenchman to think out all these things, for just as certainly as he appreciates beauty at its utmost value, just as certainly is it true that he appreciates that something more than beauty, which is bound to retain a man, once he is made conscious of it. Balzac says, “The most celebrated attachments in history were all inspired by women in whom * the vulgar would have found some defect. Cleopatra, Joanna of Naples, Diana of Poictiers, La Valliere, Madam Pompadour, in short most of the women whom love has rendered celebrated were not without imperfections and infirmities, whilo most women whose beauty is described to us as perfect have been finally unhappy in their loves. This apparent caprice must have its cause. Perhaps men live by sentiment more than by pleasure; perhaps the charm, wholly physical, of a beautiful woman, has its bounds, while the charm, essentially moral, of a woman of moderate beauty is infinite.” Interesting Women. Gail Hamilton says that “women can never hope to rule the state until they give up their baby names.” Sabah Bernhardt comes back to visit us less fragile in figure than formerly, but is said to be none the less interesting in her acting. Miss Hewitt, daughter of Mayor Hewitt, is said to have introduced the fashion among girls of having mastiffs and other large dogs as pets. The marriage of Miss Alary Agnes Christina Mesmer and Mr. C. J. Griffith, at Los Angeles, was a marriage of millions. The bride has $1,000,000 in her own right, while the groom’s wealth is estimated at $5,000,000 in land and mines. She is twenty years old and speaks four languages, while he is thirty-four. Miss Grace Howard, daughter of “Joe” Howard, is going to Dakota next month to spend two or three years instructing the Indians. Miss Howard is an exceedingly talented woman, with a somewhat strong mind. She has spent som.u time on the frontier, and quite a strong friendship exists between her and Miss Rose Elizabeth Cleveland because of their sympathies in the same direction. Aliss Middie Alobgan, the great newspaper woman authority on live stock, does not live in that much described and marvelous house of hers in Jersey. She has managed to obtain the office of station agent at a little flag station on the Pennsylvania Railroad just out of Jersey City. In this way, by sleeping in the depot, she saves rent, and picks up enough coal and wood along the track to keep her in fuel. She never pays a car fare nor a ferry tick t, and if she cannot get a pass or deadhead her way she walks.