CHRISTMAS BOXES FOR BEAUTY.
A novel kind of Christmas Box is suggested by a legend which Mr. Punch lately beheld in the window of a hair-dresser's shop—"Presents for Christmas." It was posted in the midst of a variety of Chignons. A box containing a quantity of false hair is the Christmas-Box thereby presented to the imagination of the passer-by. But who would offer it to a young lady? Such a present is equivalent to the gift of a wig. It is a Christmas-Box or a New Year's Gift of a class in which may be included several other articles of a similar description, but more useful, and much more ornamental. For instance, you might give a friend in need, personal and pecuniary, a Christmas-Box in the shape of a set of artificial teeth, or the "Guinea Jaw" of our friend the Dentist, or a glass eye, or a gutta-percha nose, or a wooden leg.
Some of the "Presents for Christmas" above referred to were Chignons which looked like horses' tails. Others of the Chignons for Christmas-Boxes exhibited a remarkable resemblance to the tail of a comet, from which eccentric luminary the idea of those prodigious top-knots may possibly have been borrowed. Astronomy, along with Geography and the Use of the Globes, has long formed a branch of female education. An intelligent girl, fresh from boarding-school, if requested to describe the Coma Berenices might, or might not inform her questioner that it was a celestial Chignon.