DROPPED HAIRPINS.

Thames Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2993, 18 September 1878, Page 3

DROPPED HAIRPINS.

* What man who, away from his wiie or sweetheart (and every nv-ui, neither a monster nor a mathematician, is very apt to have ohe or the other), has ever picked up a hair-pin without reverting longingly and somewhat iovingly to her? He forms hypotheses, indulges in surmises, : draws inferences from the hair-pin that are unfavorable to celibacy and hostile to Malthus. Like a gifted naturalist, he i constructs the whole from the slender • part; he evolves the entire woman from I the isoscelean hook, and depicts her jas / a ; glorious creature. ; His memory j acts very much as his imagination. The : creature whom he has left behind apj pears fairer and fonder than he has seen her, and she whom he has not beheld glows under the hues of the ideal. ' There is nothing like a discovered hair-pin to enkindle a man's recollection or stimulate his fancy, and the dropper of the hair-pins knows it. She drops them with malice prepense, and she is not mistaken in her guesses at the general result. May not the adroit distribution of hair-pins, under the assumption that they have been lost, be a feminine plan to captivate and hold c-iptive the sterner sex? May it not be a time - honoured, persistently • followed design to undermine our independence P May not the woman's rights women of centuries past—the agitator of woman's rights dates centuries back—have first concocted the scheme which so affects and fashions us ? Women have an order of Freemasonry of their own. -There are some things which they impart to, and clearly understand through, one another, but which they never tell us, or convey by the slightest intimation. They may all be, regardless of color, climate, or condition, members of the Secret Order of the Dropping Hair-pin. We may have been helped and hindered, baffled and benefited, mocked and managed, deceived and delighted by it for generations, without ever suspecting its existence. Men are always managed most and best when they never dream that they are managed at all, and this sort of managment may be the special purpose of the S.O.D.H. If so, who shall say the purpose has not been well and wonderfully 1 carried'outP — New York Times.