FOR WOMEN FOLK.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 267, 21 April 1915, Page 6

FOR WOMEN FOLK.

" BY EILEEN."

" Eileen " will be glad to receive items of interest and value to women for publication or reference in this column.

TRAGEDY AND ROMANCE. WAR, THE GRIM JESTER. NURSE AND WOUNDED SOLDIER. In tlie vast and intricate war;) of war, where there are many strange and almost incredible happenings, the strangest are those that, in these huge forces of battling men, should draw together men who have not yet met for years, brothers even who have been parted from boyhood. "It is undoubtedly the ease," said a corporal of the Highland Light Infantry, now awaiting orders to rejoin his regiment "that many strange meetings take place on t\i» battlefield, and the more one sees tlra mere does one realise the smallness oi tlie world wo live in.

"Out tlidrp Omy tell a story of a young ollicer of the Guards who ran against his own half-brother, a son of his mother liy a former husband, who was fighting on the German side.

"Naturally, the two could not draw on eaeli other, but the German half-brother was killed before the other's eyes by one of his own men."

■At times these chance meetings read like figments from the genius of some great novelist. Could imagination transcend this story! "Into a cottage inhabited by a girl of IS and her mother was carried a young soldier of the Regiment of Infantry, mortally wounded. He had only a few minutes to live, and as he was laid upon the bed the girl dropped on her knees by his side, weeping. He was her sweetheart and he died with his hand in hers."

Romance again, but lighter now, in the story told by Private G. Trevor, of the Devonshire Regiment, although it is a similar and almost as wonderful an incident:

"A man of ours had a strange experience the other day. Some years ago he had been engaged to a girl, but they had a row. She became a nurse, and he went into tile army. He got hit, and when brought into the base hospital who should lie find but his former sweetheart!" Grim wit!" an almost Greek sense of destiny, too, is the meeting between a British and a German soldier in one sl/arp little engagement. They had been bosom friends in England, and the German had been instrumental in keeping his friend out of the workhouse during a long spell of unemployment. lie wanted "to pay his debt by sparing the Gorman, but the latter wouldn't hear of it, and they fought to the end, which was bad for the German.

There are no friendships when the bayonets cross and bullets lly, and a Northumberland Fusilier found it so: "On the way back from a night battle I thought the face of a dead German seemed familiar to me. Tstoopod down, and recognised the man as one I had worked beside for four years in an engineering shop on Tvneside."

TEN CHINESE GIRLS. Ten Chinese girls landed in New York last September, bent on completing tbeir education. It seems incredible tliat good could come of tlic terrible Boxer uprising in China, vet it is to the American lives lost during those fearful years that these little girls owe their educational opportunity, says a writer in the American Woman's Magazine. ' Proud as we are of our country, few of us know that when China offered the United States $14,000,000 in restitution for the loss of her citizens during the Boxer uprising, America returned the money on the conditir 'hilt the entire sum be spent in Ameri an education for tile Chinese people.

Since 1!)0S Chinese men have successfully passed the Governmental examinations, but these ten little indemnity girls form the first group of women to whom the opportunity of American education has been giveir. One of these girls will study medicine, and return to China with liands and brain well skilled in the science of which her native sisters are in such need. Another, her' musical education complete, will bear back the gayer songs and motifs of America to cars accustomed only to the minor strains of Chinese music.

General teaching, too, is a great field for the woman worker in China. Those of the ten who receive college educations will be welcomed joyfully back to their native land, where they will share with the less fortunate their knowledge gained in American schools.

One is glad to know that in a country I where marriage is almost essential for a woman, an American education will not affect the matrimonial chances of these girls. For China has many educated men who want wives and children as enlightened as they. It is among the women that these American-educated girls will feel thair loneliness, for of the 400,000,00(1 women in China, a pitifully small proportion has received an education. But these six will serve as the enterin!; wedge, and each succeeding group of indemnity girls will find a move enlightened China awaiting them. WOMEN TURNING GREY—DYE GONE. One of the most surprising results of »thc war is the large number of grey'haired women of fashion one now sees , both in London and Paris. This, the "World' has discovered after somo investigation, is not wholly due to personal distress or patriotic motives. Truth is that the best hair dyes hitherto have been made 11 Germany. The (supply has 'been cut off by the war, and : the women fear to take tho risk of -vo--1 ducing some weird effect I>~ changing their dves.

If Ton put one sort of (hie 011 the toy of another, it is said that the conlliet of chemicals may produce anything from sea-green to spontaneous combustion. So grey is 'becoming a fashionable color. Shampooing, Hairdressing, and Twisting. Electrolysis for the permanent removal of superfluous hair. Switches, Toupees, etc. Ladies' combings made un to any design. Mrs. BEADLE, Egmoni

Toilet Parlors, Griffiths' Buildings, Carnegie Library.