"This was once in the papers," says Marie innocently. "They said it was true. There was a girl going to take her first communion, and she got into the churchyard before she missed her braid. Then she turned round and started home after her braid, and met a man with a covered basket on his arm. He asked her what she was going for, and she told him she was going home for what she forgot, and the man said, 'Look in the basket, and see if that is your switch.' She looked, and there was the hair coiled up. Then he asked her if he might put it on her head, and the girl said yes, and he put it on, and she went to church.
"It came to the place where the minister gives her the bread, and her braid slipped down on one shoulder; but when he gave her the wine it jump like it going to strike the cup, for it was a snake the man put on her, and it was fast to her head and never came off again."
Marie's mother in youth worked for a Swedish farmer, and it was her duty to get up about three o'clock in the morning and light a fire under the boiler where the cows' feed was heated. This was in the barn. The cows stood upon a floor over a large pit wherein were caught all the liquids of the stable. The sleepy maid took a coal upon a chip, instead of matches, and this primitive custom saved her from horribly drowning. For as she opened the cows' stable one morning, and was taking a step within, the chip flared up, and showed her three cows swimming below in the pit. The floor had given way.
"Sometimes there are excursions across the ocean," says Marie, speaking of that star of a home visit which lures her into the future, "and you can go and come back for twenty-five dollars. They do not have nice things to eat in the steerage, but you can keep alive." M.H.C.
* * * * *
The "Additional Hair" Supply.
The late war between France and China had one effect which the public did not expect,—it created a panic among the French dealers in human hair. Before that war began it was not generally known that a vast proportion of the false hair used in Europe and America was imported from China into France and there prepared for the trade. But the beginning of hostilities between the two countries made the fact apparent by the sudden cutting off of the customary supply from the Celestial Empire. A German paper mentions that in 1883 the hair thus imported amounted to one hundred and twenty-four thousand seven hundred and fifteen kilograms, for which the French dealers paid at the rate of only ten or twelve francs per kilogram. As no other country can, or at any rate will, supply human hair in such enormous quantities and at such a low price, the effect on the market may easily be imagined. The hair-merchants of Marseilles had been accustomed to furnish at least twenty-five thousand coiffures for women and several thousand wigs for men every year; and even before the stoppage of direct communication with China they had found it hard to get as much raw material as they needed. When their principal drawing-point became inaccessible they were reduced to despair, and perhaps presented the only case ever known in which "tearing the hair" would seem to have been attended with some practical benefit. However, the termination of the war revived their hopes, and they are now making up for the lost time with a vigor and determination which even threaten the male Celestial with the loss of his sacred pig-tail.
The European sources from which human hair is obtained are not numerous or very prolific. Many peasant-women of Normandy and Bretagne sell their beautiful brown, red, or golden locks, but these are of such fine quality that they command very high prices. Norman or Breton girls having braids eighty centimetres in length sell them for as much as a thousand francs. Perfectly white hair from the same French provinces brings a sum which seems almost fabulous. The French journal "Science et Nature" declares that the price commonly paid for a braid of such white hair weighing one kilogram is twenty-five thousand francs.
The hair-merchants of France have never been very successful in drawing supplies for their business from England, Germany, or any of the countries in the northern part of Europe. Lately, however, they have begun to have a good deal of success among the lower classes of the Italians. Their imports from Italy are already comparatively large, and they seem to be increasing every year. Such an easy way of getting money as this opportunity affords must appear vastly attractive to the swarms of professional beggars who infest every highway, church door, and public square in Southern Italy, and whose enjoyment of the indispensable dolce far niente cannot be spoiled by merely submitting to the operation of having their hair cut off. It is probable that they furnish much more of the hair brought from Italy than do the laboring-classes of the cities or the honest contadini of the rural districts.
The idea of actually wearing hair which once belonged to some member of "the unspeakable" lazzaroni tribe cannot be considered a fascinating one. At the same time it is at least not more unattractive than the consciousness of having fallen heir to the capillary adornments of a Cantonese tonka-boat girl. And in reality such a feeling, though natural enough, would be based upon nothing but imagination. All the hair purchased and used by the dealers in Paris, Marseilles, and other French cities to which the Chinese and Italian hair is brought goes through a number of preparatory processes, which cleanse and purify it thoroughly; and when it is ready to be sold again it is probably in as unobjectionable a state as hair can reach. As for the imagination, if we were to allow it to govern us entirely in all such cases we should soon find ourselves restricted to almost as few comforts and conveniences as those unhappy historical characters whose constant fear of poison reduced their whole diet to boiled eggs. Still, the feeling is one of which it is very hard to rid ourselves; and in all probability the ladies who derive the most unalloyed satisfaction from their "additional" braids are those who have had them made from "combings" of their own hair. J.A.C.