was to be a fright, and an allusion to a carroty
girl, in a song or play, was sure to raise a laugh
of derision. But now, carrots are the fashion,
the rage. The girl with the ruddy locks, instead
of plastering her hair down, to look like polished
slabs of Peterhead granite, combs it out and
lets the sun into it, and straightway it is a
fleece of gold. Golden locks—that is to say,
the ridiculed "carrots" of another period—are
now the admiration of all the men, and the
envy of all the women. It is no secret, I
believe, that many women are in the habit of
bleaching their dark hair in order to impart to
it a tinge of the fashionable and admired red.
I am informed, too—and I can add my personal
testimony to the fact—that red-haired girls
who have been on the shelf until they are no
longer young, are now going off in the
matrimonial market like wildfire.

The great discovery that women have made,
however, is not that auburn hair—as they love
to call it—is particularly pretty; but that any
coloured hair is pretty when naturally and
artistically displayed. In fact, they have
discovered that their hair is their chief beauty.  I
hold, that no woman can be ugly, or even
plain, if she have a profusion of hair.  The
eye is nearly always a beautiful thing in woman.
The mouth may be large and ungraceful, the
nose may turn up, the cheeks may be too thin
or too plump, but the eye, in its normal and
natural state, is rarely without beauty, either of
form or expression. Good eyes and a wealth of
hair will cover a multitude of deficiencies in
other respects. Our maiden aunts have found
this out, and these elderly ladies are now as
smart and almost as juvenile as our sweethearts.
In fact, when Miss Tabitha and Miss Edith are
out walking together, it is hard to say, until
you come to close quarters, which is the old
girl and which is the young one.

The moral influence of dress is well known to
every one who has been exhilarated by clean
linen, or depressed by an ill-fitting coat. I
believe that we take a great deal of our moral
tone from the cut of our clothes.  A good
condition of the clothes we wear, is necessary to
sustain our self-satisfaction and complacency,
but cut and fashion give elegance and ease. If
you are sensible of being a guy, your
comportment will be weak and ineffective. You
cannot strut like a peacock when you know that
your feathers are those of a turkey. You must
have a sense of being up to the mark, before
you can practise an elegant walk, or adopt
an imposing swagger. When our dress was
ungraceful and uncomfortable, we ourselves
were ungraceful and uncomfortable also.  The
recent fashions have worked a wonderful change
in this respect. The maids of merry England
are much more lively than they used to be.
They are more sprightly, they have more to
say for themselves, and their manners, which
formerly were cold and stiff and artificial, have
now become easy and natural.

Viewing such a wealth of female beauty, and
seeing on every hand so many charming faces
and graceful figures, I am sometimes disposed
to look at our girls as the Scottish maiden
looked at love—in the abstract. As an elderly
fellow, and in the abstract, l am apt to think
that our girls are too pretty to be married.
When some great hulking fellow, with an
elaborate shirt-front—which is generally his principal
feature—comes into our society, and leads off
(to St. George's, Hanover-square) one of those
pretty girls, who sing to me and prattle to me,
and are the delight of my eyes with their
sprightly and engaging ways, I feel a very
strong inclination to kick him. I regard him
as a bloated monopolist, a Vandal, a Goth,
an iconoclast.  I have written up, "Do not
touch the statues," and he has touched the
statues; I have warned him not to pluck my
flowers, and he has plucked them from under
my very nose.  This is very aggravating to an
elderly fellow like myself—fellows who are
either confirmed bachelors or very much married,
and who consequently are privileged to regard
love "in the abstract."   Which, by the way,
is a very pleasant and innocent way of looking
at it.

I will say this, however, that St. George's,
Hanover-square, has not now that blighting
influence upon my flowers that it used to have
in the old days. In those old days, when my
pretty girls got married, they thought it a
privilege and an obligation of their new state to
disregard the elegancies of dress. They very
soon got dowdy, and began to wear caps; and
the consequence was, that the hulking fellow
with the elaborate shirt-front very soon began
to be indifferent. But, now-a-days, when the
cap period approaches, the matron renews her
youth with some clever little trick of hair-
dressing, which makes her look almost as young
as her daughters. The world is all the brighter
and pleasanter for these elegant and sprightly
habits of our women folks. I only hope that,
while they have learned to wear becoming
clothes, and to dress their hair, they are not
neglecting the art of making a flaky crust.

CUTTING OUT CATTLE.

There is great bustle and excitement at the
cattle station this afternoon, for we begin to
muster fat cattle and "strangers" to-morrow,
and the stockmen from all the neighbouring
stations have come to assist, and take away
their stray stock.

We mean to start in the cool of the evening,
ride over the plains about twenty miles, and
camp out, so as to begin our work at daylight
in the morning.  All hands, blacks and whites,
are very busy, catching horses down at the yard,
saddling, rolling up blankets, and preparing
for a day or two "out back on the plains."
Maneroo Jim is catching a buck-jumping colt
from among the crowd of kicking and screaming
horses assembled in the yard: an operation not
to be accomplished without a good deal of
swearing, and flourishing of long sticks.  At