Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/172

 *legs," or "bandy-legs." This condition is brought about by allowing children to walk too soon. Every mother should be on her guard against it, as it is a source of much mortification, and cannot completely be hidden even by long dresses. Nothing can remedy it.

False calves, manufactured of cork, and fastened to the leg beneath the stocking, are a device of the toilet which we have never, to our knowledge, observed out of Paris, and which might as well be allowed to remain as one of the peculiar features of that great capital.

THE FOOT AND SHOE.

A pretty foot, says Goethe, is the one element of beauty which defies the assaults of age. If properly cared for, it remains as perfect at seventy as it was at seventeen. We have the cheering certainty, therefore, that the attention we bestow on it will repay us as long as we live.

Yet how little do we give to it! What a sight it is in bathing hours on the sea-beach, to see the distorted, red, corned, bunioned, and swollen feet of the bathers! No wonder "corn-doctors" do a thriving business, and can build handsome houses on their neighbors' toes!

A well-formed foot is scarcely to be found in modern civilization. The late actress, Madame Vestris, whom we have already mentioned, was said to have had the