The Home Circle.

Southern Cross, Volume 2, Issue 12, 23 June 1894, Page 3

The Home Circle.

[Conducted bt LINDA.] TO CORRESPONDENTS AND |REAI -BBS. I have to thank an esteemed contributor for a number of recipes, several of which are given this week. « E.S.S.” has sent in another instalment (to appear shortly) of her interesting article on “ What shall we read” but what has become of « Scotia F” A further sketch from her, would be welcome. “A Man has written a nice letter, but I cannot use it without bis name and address ; and, speaking of men, where has my shrewd, kind - hearted old friend “ Tammie Chalmers ” got to F Will “Etta” accept my best thanks for her timely article. Maydaughters as well as mothers take her advice to heart. It may save them a heartbreak hereafter. We are so apt, are we not, to “ never prize the music till the sweet-voiced bird has flrwn F And now a few words to the readers of this page. I wonder if any of you have ever submitted your fair hands to the inspection of a professor of palmistry P If y ou have, did you gain any advantage from it did the predictions ventured come true . 1 have been led into these remarks this week by the prominence which has been given of late to the subject of fortune-telling. Several professors of the art, including members of the fansex, have been prosecuted in our courts of justice, and about time, too, I think, for some of them were reaping a rich harvest from those foolish enough to patronise them. Nor are the papers altogether free from blame, for at least one of them published a highly laudatory interview with one of the gentry. In this connection I cannot do better than refer to an article in a recent number of the Century magazine in which the writer quotes the following pertinent passage from Mr Francis Galton’s “Finger-Prints”: “The palms of the hands and the soles of the feet are covered with two totally distinct classes of marks. The most conspicuous are the creases 01 folds of the skin, which interest the followers of palmistry, but which aie no more significant to others than the creases in old clothes ; they show the lines of most frequent flexure, and nothing more.” The writer of the article sums up the matter in the following sentence : “As an amusement for those who find pleasure in holding each other s Lands, and talking airy nothings, or for the uses of writers of fiction, palmistry has great possibilities ; but for anything beyond, respect for it indicates a mind either uninformed or unbalanced.”