Mower County Transcript

The County Fair.

Two generations ago wax fruit and hair flowers were in the line of ladylike accomplishments what feminine wood carving and house decoration are today. Young women did embroidery and worked samplers then. Today they row boats, swim and practice with dumb-bells. Not one woman in a million ever makes hair flowers or 'waxworks' in our time. But the managers of county fairs have not found this out yet, and therefore still offer premiums for these articles. We take the present occasion to make the facts in the case known to them. We call their attention to the fact that the sewing machine does the embroidery now. In place of the hair flower business the girl of one generation painted china, but the girl of the present does not even do that any more. She does not even roll her eyes upward and whang a guitar. With tears in our eyes we beg the county fair managers to give that hair flower and wax flower chestnut a rest. It certainly deserves it. Let us lay it away with the weeping willow and tombstone picture and the samplers of the distant past.

Then there are the five cent prize man, "every package containing a prize," the brass jewelry board, the miniature horse race, "cigars thrown in," etc., and the other devices whereby the wretched fakir swindles the rural boy out of his treasured nickels and dimes. He would probably be arrested in a city street if he undertook his skin game, but here he flourishes unchecked.

It may be that the hair flower and waxwork business and the petty five cent fakir have an important connection with the progress of rural civilization in this country, but if so it is not apparent to the unprejudiced outsider.

Here is how Oliver Wendell Holmes describes the fashionable 5 o'clock tea: "It is giggle, gabble, gobble and git."