children
are delightfully sturdy and healthful-looking, with their curly red, or
golden, locks (generally bleached, like those of their mothers, to an
almost flaxen tint by the sun) laid bare to every change of wind or
weather. With this rough, careless life of theirs they seem perfectly
happy and content."
"
I defy any man, or woman, to feel thoroughly discontented while the
kettle sings." Reading again and again, always with renewed delight,
Dickens' immortal story of The Cricket on the Hearth, never does it escape our recollection that " the kettle began it."
The
mirrors of the ancients were of polished metal, as are those of the
Japanese now, and of some other Oriental nations. Mirrors of smooth
glass, with a metallic backing to act as the reflecting surface, did
not become common until the sixteenth century. The usual method of
preparing glass mirrors is to coat one side of the glass with an
amalgam of Tin, and Mercury ; but mirrors are now frequently
constructed by depositing pure Silver on the glass behind. Keats tells,
in his Poem, Lamia, (1820), of a young man who, having fallen
in love with, and married, a serpent, (or Lamia), which had assumed the
form of a beautiful woman, stooped—
" Bending to her open eyes,
Where he was 'mirrored' small, in paradise."
"
What a quaint comment one might make," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, " on
that expression of the Apostle's—' seeing through a glass darkly.' So
we did in his day ; and so we did seventy years ago. But, since then we
have put two pieces of glass together,—a piece of flint glass, and a
piece of crown glass ; and now we see through our double glass clearly
; how amazingly clearly ! "
