“Sometimes there are excursions across the ocean,” says Marie, speaking of that star of a home visit which lures her into the future, “and you can go and come back for twenty-five dollars.  They do not have nice things to eat in the steerage, but you can keep alive.”  M.H.C.

* * * * *

The “Additional Hair” Supply.

The late war between France and China had one effect which the public did not expect,—­it created a panic among the French dealers in human hair.  Before that war began it was not generally known that a vast proportion of the false hair used in Europe and America was imported from China into France and there prepared for the trade.  But the beginning of hostilities between the two countries made the fact apparent by the sudden cutting off of the customary supply from the Celestial Empire.  A German paper mentions that in 1883 the hair thus imported amounted to one hundred and twenty-four thousand seven hundred and fifteen kilograms, for which the French dealers paid at the rate of only ten or twelve francs per kilogram.  As no other country can, or at any rate will, supply human hair in such enormous quantities and at such a low price, the effect on the market may easily be imagined.  The hair-merchants of Marseilles had been accustomed to furnish at least twenty-five thousand coiffures for women and several thousand wigs for men every year; and even before the stoppage of direct communication with China they had found it hard to get as much raw material as they needed.  When their principal drawing-point became inaccessible they were reduced to despair, and perhaps presented the only case ever known in which “tearing the hair” would seem to have been attended with some practical benefit.  However, the termination of the war revived their hopes, and they are now making up for the lost time with a vigor and determination which even threaten the male Celestial with the loss of his sacred pig-tail.

The European sources from which human hair is obtained are not numerous or very prolific.  Many peasant-women of Normandy and Bretagne sell their beautiful brown, red, or golden locks, but these are of such fine quality that they command very high prices.  Norman or Breton girls having braids eighty centimetres in length sell them for as much as a thousand francs.  Perfectly white hair from the same French provinces brings a sum which seems almost fabulous.  The French journal “Science et Nature” declares that the price commonly paid for a braid of such white hair weighing one kilogram is twenty-five thousand francs.