Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/102

 impaired sooner or later. Whether both or one eye is affected, the only cure is to have an operation performed, which can be done safely, expeditiously, and with almost certain success.

Another is the loss of the eye from whatever cause. In these cases vision of course can never be restored, but the deformity can be admirably concealed by the adjustment of an artificial eye, made of glass, colored to resemble accurately the remaining eye. There are many little precautions about the use of such an instrument, which the reader can learn from her physician, but which we trust she will never have need to know.

Much more to the purpose is it for us to divulge a few secrets about the brightness and the expression of the eyes. We could disclose some cunning devices in vogue among the fashionable belles of the Old World to give expression to these organs. But these are naughty and dangerous devices, not proper for the women of America to practise. For instance, these reckless belles place a single drop of that deadly poison, prussic acid (dilute, acid. hydrocyan. dil. U. S. P.), in the bottom of a wineglass, and hold the glass against the eye for two or three seconds. Or, still more rashly, they take ever so small a quantity, a piece not larger than a grain of rice, of an ointment containing that mortal drug atropia, and this they rub on the brow. The first of these proceedings gives clearness