An Island of Pretty Women.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 77, 22 November 1884, Page 5

An Island of Pretty Women.

Thk Channel Islands, and particularly Jersey, possess much of interest to the stranger, but the crowning glory of Jersey is the beauty of her women. For general come-, liness they would readily be awarded a prize in any competititon of feminine grace. Jlare creamy complexions that would put the bloom on the peach to blush, figures made graceful and sinewy by bodily toil, with rather strongly-cut features, eyes like aloes, and lustrous dark hair, the girls met on the streets of Sfc Heliers seem to the stranger the personification of womanly independence, beauty, and maidenly reserve. The soft white mists that wrap the island every night from sundown to sunrise give them carnation cheeks. The toil that brings with it the active, healthy body is due to causes which will enlist on the side of these women the sympathies of true manhood. It is because ©f the woful dearth of men in Jersey that the women do all the work. Where you meet one man in those tortuous streets of St. Heliers, you meet ten women. Out among the green farms this disproportion of the sexes is even more painfully apparent. The heavy, ungainly carts on the country roads are, almost without exception, driven by women, and handsome women, too. Groups of cherry-cheeked girls may be seen in wayside orchards, some picking apples from the trees, others straining at the rude cider presses. The little fields, with their luxuriant growth of turnips, cabbages, and stuabagas, all are tended by women, while the blooming flowers in the house-yards show in their rich variety the evidence of woman's care and attBntion, None but women are to be seen at the big public market of St. Heliers — women buying and women selling. What men you see are either too young or too old and decrepit, boys who have not started out in life, or old sea captains who have come home to end their days, smelling of salt and full of reminiscences of stormy voyages to Buenos Ayres, to Australia, or through the China seas. — "Boston Times."