The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1890-12-21

then be in vogue? As for me, am only
certain that the world moves, and that
the things of today are the starting
point for the things of tomorrow and
that lust because we have so improved
upon the methods of our fathers we
NAV be very sure that our children will
improve upon US.
But to come back to the City of Rome,
as she swung along to her decrepitude
and her oblivion, and | lying in the
steamer chair let my gaze travel a few
feet beyond her deck, Il few faAt above
her smokestack, and save It? The
sea and the skyl And how much change
has a century wrought upon them? Or
a score of centuries, or the ten or twelve
millions of years at which believe they
Just now set the age OF our little globe?
Probably Adam did not go TO sea, and
Noah's famous voyage was only on fresh
water, but whichever of the patTiarchs
first found himself out OF sight Of land
enjoyed precisely the same sea and sky
scope that l contemplated from the deck
of the City Of Rome; and it Is fair TO
conclude that the woman who ''crosses"
in the summer of 1890, even though she
travel by balloon, VIII see nothing differ
ent.
And so with all Dame Natures works.
There are a few very old trees in the
world; the cedars of Mount Lebanon, the
olives of Gethsesnane, some of the big
trees in California--all date back from
few hundred to couple of thousand
years, and are to be taken as fair speci-
mems of the timber of their day. But are
they old fashioned?
Old certainly, as we count age, meas
uring it by our own puny span, but
their fashion differs IN no respect from
the fashion of the trees planted last Ar
Dor Day; the roots still tend downward
and draw their nourishment from the
same salts and vegetable solutions that
fed their ancestors, and the branches
thrust themselves up and breathe the
air, dividing its gases one from the other
and condensing its dews upon their palm
like leaves, just as the first progenitors
of those redwood trees did when some
race whose existence we only dimly sus-
pect claimed "these United States" as
their own, by some name, In some Ian
guage whose very tradition is forgotten.
The flowers of our gardens die year
by year, and we are fond Of mentioning
them as ''ephemeral," and using them as
types of swift decay, but year by year
they come up again, and century ago
the blossom WAS exactly that of today,
and century hence it viii be no differ
ent, so that if the flowers discuss us as
patrcnizingly as we do them they prob
ably remark:
Poor, ephemeral things! They live
sixty or seventy years and then die root
and branch, and nothing comes up from
the place where they are planted"
Another class of creation, apparently
rs short lived as the flowers, and yet
showing the same gentle persistency in
recurrence, is the fashion of our clothes.
You bring home from Paris the very
last caprice of Worth or Crapsaud in a
gown or bonnet, and after one season, or
at most two, it is Old fashioned, COM
mon, out Of style and gone by; but lay
it aside safe from moth and dust, and
hundred years from now it viii very
possibly be found the height of the
fashion, the very newest thing out.
Don't you believe this? Well, consider
the lilies of today, and then look at the
statues of Greece and Rome, or, if you
don't care to go SO far, turn to some pict-
ures of the time of the first Napoleon,
when on his road to empire he halted
for few years in a consulate and a re-
public and emphasized his ideas by re-
viving the costume of the Greek repub-
lie.
Why do so many dear creatures, with
Milesian or Saxon or composite features,
dress their hair in a tight little knot on
the back of their heads, with perhaps a
fillet bound thrice round their cTaniums,
except because such a style was found
becoming to the low foreheads, straight
noses and statuesque lips and chins Of
Helen of Troy or Penelope or Phryne
or Aspasia or any other of the beauties
of the world some 1880 years before the
Christian era began?
And here let me suggest that one
trouble about reviving ancient fashions,
however graceful and pretty they may
be, is the impossibility of reviving an
cient types of beauty. Before the Chris
tan era and for many years after peO-
pie did not travel as they do now, and
consequently did not intermarry as they
do now.
Each nation as a whole was born,
lived. married and died within It's own
borders, Gila go g national tyne, both of
features and costume. WAS preserved and
became identified with the weaTers; but
now that steam and electricity have
brought the ends of the world together,
and it has practically as well as geo
graphically become a globe without
ends, types are getting SO mixed that
| Greciun profile is rs likely TO be born IN
| Alabama as IN Athens. and a Roman
nose may have bumped itself in Califor-
! MIA and never seen the IIbeT. But this
being the case. my dear friends, when
your dressmazer proposes a Grecian
robe. or your hairdreSSer a Psyche knot,
or your milliner n toque, or your saucy
! little cousin offers YOU her Tam. pause
and consider whether nature has adapt
ed Your stvle to those styles, and if she
hasn't don't accept them!
This is. perhaps, depression, but we
return to the beginning and say once
more that the fashions OF today are many
of them the fashions CO a century or more
ago. and there is every reason to believe
will be the fashions Of a century or two
in the future. although. of course. there