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Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 17, Issue 92, 27 January 1871, Page 3

It is impossible (says the London News) to walk in the row, to saunter along the drive, or to attend any of- the various gatherings where fair faces are supposed to be the chief attraction, without noticing how many of them owe their imagined charms to another hand than that of na ture. During the last eight years the odious practice of painting the face has been steadily growing until, in the most conspicuous classes of society, the practice has ceased to be the exception, aud has become the rule. Once more, as in the time of Steele, we have a race of Picts amongst us. Formerly, an,-old harridan, if she spread a little cautious rouge over the cheeks that age would have spared, had unremitted excitement not been superadded to years, was pointed out with the finger, and was in a double sense a marked woman. Nowadays the youngest Augers dabble in the pigment. The disease has spread from the cheeks to every portion of the face. The mouth, which one would have thought the last to catch the infection, has taken up the most violent form, and hundreds of women go about London with a perpetual lie upon their lips. Pencils for the eyebrows, and even for the eye-lashes, are common wares on a modern toilet table. Nothing strikes a stranger more than the want of expres sion in the countenances which flash past him during the hours that carriages congregate at the much affected spot. They lack all mobility. There is no play of features about them ; they are fixed and set. Moore would never have compared any of them to the lake that breaks into dimples and laughs in the sun. This phenomenon, so often remarked on, is fully explained when it is remembered that a single injudicious smile might mar the labor of hours. It is lamentable to think that the repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere is too often to be attributed, not to any inherent refinement, or to any inherited calm grace, but rather to a horrible iear that a moment's animation might thwart the study of an entire morning.

TRYING to do business without advertising (says an American paper) is like winking in the dark ; you may know that you are keeping up a powerful winking, but nobody else has any idea of it.