The Arizona sentinel., 1886-05-29
STRANGE HANDS.
They Tell Their Owners Character, and
 Trade, and Age.

Trade, and Age.
 Hands reveal habits, occupations, trades. A crop of them rises at the thought, like the show thrust up from crowd in honor of candidate after an election speech. There is the carpen- ter's, with the broad thumb, and those of the fraternity of flour, ingrained, mealy and white; the musicians with the powerful wrist and the fingers deli cate, sensitive and agile to the last de- gree; the hand of the seamstress, with an honorable little bit of nutmeg -grater on the forefinger that works so hard; of the scientific man, who lectures to ex- plain mysteries to lower mortals, and whose exactitude of touch is the image of his mental precision. while the nerv- ous stretch of his fingers corresponds with his tension of mind.
 The sleight-of-hand professor is a man of long fingers. A conjurer with slow and chubby hand would betray the awful secrets of the plum-pudd ing that is taken from the depths of your best hat.
 But besides character and trade, the hands tell the age. Soft and round, the baby's pair of puff-balls, with their fat wrists deeply ringed, appear as if they never can do any thIng in this world. Yet the girls hand will become treas ure, and the boys hand will battle with life and with his fellow-men for the mastery. It is appalling to think what those helpless little puff-balls have be- fore them.
 Oh, little hands, that, weak or strong,
 Have still to serve or rule so long,
 Have still so long to give or ask
 I. who so much With book pen
 Have toiled among my fellOw-m men,
 Am weary thinking of your task!
 After the first dimples they become the inky hands of school, then the awk- ward hands, that don't know what to do with themselves. Years pass, the boys hand ceases to grumble at gloves-yea, he wears them in eXtravagant freshness, in comparison as his collars grow up- ward, and his shoes tighten within an inch of his life. The result of these phe- nomena is that a ring begins to shine with charming strangeness on another hand, that seemed a child's but yester- day. The young wife tells by her hands that it is not long since the wedding, because she can not let that new ring alone, but twists it round for its novel, ty, and admires it, with an unconscious knack of caressing it in idle moments Her dimples disappear as the children gather to make home circle; it is the hand of~the woman now, with its very framework traceable.
 Dimples, bonesand wrinkles mark the three stages of life's progress. With the wrinkled stage the steadiness of youth often remains in resolute char acters. When the Duke of Wellington was a very old man he could still fill glass of water to the last possible drop, and hold it up steadily, brimful. The helpful hands keep their youthful ac- tivity, too, far into the whitening age. And in the nobly-loving natures there is sort of immortality of youth; the warmth of affection has given more than royal prerogative; the hand is beauti- ful always to the eyes that know it familiarly. The latter years may stamp it with the impress of longer past of tenderness, faithfulness and bounty. It is not the "old'' hand, but the ''dear" hand, and it never grows older, but only more dear. He who doubts the truth of this last mystery has not yet found out that hands, as well as hearts, have peculiar place in our knowledge and love of one another.-CdSSeWS Fdnlilu M10dzine.