Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/303

 which let us into divers secrets of the service, the solution of the puzzle was easy enough to us. There were, in the first place, thousands of spies, secret agents, and fugitives, both men and women, who resorted to these artifices for disguise. Secondly, and here the bulk of the trade was, very many officers, especially in cities, were accustomed to be absent without leave, and to frequent places where they did not wish to be recognized by their superiors, or by the enlisted men of their commands. Hence, they kept by them a citizen's dress and these disguises, for use on such escapades. This we know was a very general habit.

A few years ago an absurd clamor was raised by some sensational papers about the alleged discovery of minute ova—nits, in plain terms—on the hair sold for chignons. It was asserted that any one who wore them exposed her head to the invasion of very unwelcome guests of the insect kind. Small masses called gregarines were pointed out on some hair as these pretended ova. There was not a word of scientific truth in all this. The methods employed to prepare hair for market will certainly clean it thoroughly from all such impurities, and the gregarines, when examined by competent microscopists, turn out to be nothing but very minute fungi, entirely harmless to the skin, and also very rarely met with on false hair of any kind.