d
reputation. Both in novels and plays it is common to give the rascal
of the plot "villanous red hair;" and in the English school of
painters, the traitor Judas is generally distinguished by it. In the
East, black is the favorite color, and the Persians abhor a red-haired
woman. Light brown or golden hair is the universal favorite. The
Greeks gave it to Apollo, Venus, and Minerva. The Romans had such a
passion for it that, in the days of the Empire, light hair brought
from Germany (to make wigs for Roman ladies) sold for its weight in
gold. The Germans themselves, not content with the beautiful hair
Nature had given them, made a soap of goat's tallow and beechwood
ashes to brighten the color. Homer loved "blondes," and Milton and
Shakespeare are full of golden-haired beauties, while the pages of
the novelist and the galleries of painters, ancient and modern, show
the same preference.

Lavater insists greatly on the color of hair as an index to the
disposition. "Chestnut hair," he says, "indicates love of change and
great vivacity; black hair, passion, strength, ambition, and energy;
fair hair, mildness, tenderness, and judgment."

Fashion has dressed the hair in many absurd and also in many beautiful
forms; but through all changes, curls, floating free and natural, have
had a majority of admirers. Some one says that "of all the revolvers
aimed at men's hearts, curls are the most deadly," and from the
persistent instinct of women in retaining them, I am inclined to
indorse this statement. The Armenians and some other Asiatics twist
the hair into the form of a mitre; the Parthians and Persians leave it
long and floating; the Scythians and Goths wear it short, thick, and
bristling; the Arabians and kindred people often cut it on the crown.
In the South of Europe, "to be in the hair" is a common expression for
unmarried girls, because they wear their hair long and flowing, while
matrons put it up in a coil at the back of the head.

Until the ninth century in England, Nature pretty much led the
fashions in hair-dressing; then plaits turned up on each side of the
cheek were introduced; and in the eleventh century the hair all
disappeared under the head-dress of that time. Early in the sixteenth
century ladies began to "turn up" the hair. Queen Margaret of Navarre
frizzed and turned back her abundant locks just as the women of our
own day do. The custom, too, that is now prevalent of braiding the
hair in two long locks an