The Redwood gazette. [volume] (Redwood Falls, Minn.) 1873-1940, 1876-03-16

lon their hands and knees, and will get
soiled and marred with nursery warfare +;
of course the servants will complain of
the big wash, and the quantity of starched
clothes required for the demands. Of the
family wardrobe. s- - @% -
~ Why not dress the children in COL
ored clothes why not put wooden articles
on them such as Mrs. As children
wear?"
"How queer you men talk! Don't you
know that Mrs. A. doesn't live on
- street, and doesn't go with our set at
all? How mortified I should feel if Mrs:
B. should call and see the children
dressed in a different way from her own!'
That is the way the talk goes on be-
tween the public realities of bills and the
domestic shams OF embroidered white
dresses.
1t is worse than wicked my DEAR"
said Punch the other day, representing a
mother speaking to her little daughter.
1t is worse than wicked-it is uulgar.''
Silk dresses form another department of
domestic sha1f1s. Just watch the cheap
silk counter at Stewards or Arnold Il Con-
stables on Saturday. Plaids and cash
meres, woolens and serges, may charm
with look, and texture, and price, never
so wisely-but they are like chatf before
the wind, as they pale before the attract
iveness of the cheap-silk department.
Oh, how these women buyers and their
consulting cabinet of advisers feel and
rustic the silk, and hold it up to the light,
and compare its thickness with that which
is twenty-five cents more a yard! How
they rattle over the favorite names of the
different French manufacturers; how the
mild hammered and obsequious men clerks
go over their same stock of remarks thou
sands and thousands of times! How the
candidate for this article of clothing CON-
pares silk with silk, and searches down
among the roots of things to find out Just
which adviser she can most rely on! And
then tie black-silk dress is bought" for
black-silk dress is always dressy you
know, dear; one always looks we'll in a
black-silk dress, doesn't one, Nary"
Always" says Mary, and out goes the
money from the husbands pocket book,
and married life is $50 sweet for the
rest Of that day!
Now what, as a man, maintain about
this phase of domestic shams is simply
this. The black silk dress idea,' which
is the normal type of American women's
dressing, is simply an attempt to be al
ways in a superlative condition of dress
which is too commonly the average Amer
can ambition.
Englishwomen dress in woolens;
Frenchwomen draw their wardrobes from
a variety of textures-but our American
women, with this prevailing pillow-sham
idea running through their lives, cannot
be happy unless they are continually, in
mud and rain, in horse-cars and in trains,
at their social best. Consequently they are
arrayed in thin and shiny silks; cheap
they may be, but at least they are silks.
But won't croak any more to-day, for
fear of becoming hoarse and unpleasant.
l might 90 into the domestic shams OF
solid silver-ware, safe and paid for in the
bank, while we use the plated ware in
our cottage homes. might go into some
of the social shams of the present age,
after the fashion of that little book which
is so old and so funny, "Thinks to My
SELF" but let me forbear. No doubt there
is true social instinct down at the root of
things in our wives, and mothers, and
daughters; an instinct to preserve the
ideal and cherish that which is best and
most truly refined.
Let us hope this is the explanation of
it. Let us believe that we men are apt
to forget the power of social sentiment in
the presence of that daily grinding ques-
ton" What is the use ~ which stares us
in the face so continually.
Therefore let us believe that man is the
possible and practical, and woman is the
ideal and the unattainable. This has an
Emersonian sound. 1t reads we'll itlooks
as if it might be philosophical.
But doubt whether this will satisfy us
the next time we come home for well
come, and are met with the warning cry:
Don't lie on the pillow-shams!'
fear, after all, either inwardly or out
wardly, we will say, as we hurl the nasty
things into the baby's crib, that which we
have always said" Confound the pillow
shams. "-Appleton's Journal.