October 26–28 Saturday – Sam’s San Francisco Letter to the Enterprise included: “A Love of a Bonnet Described,” “Re-opening of the Plaza,” and: MORE FASHIONS – EXIT “WATERFALL.”
I am told that the Empress Eugenie is growing bald on the top of her head, and that to hide this defect she now combs her “back hair” forward in such a way as to make her look all right. I am also told that this mode of dressing the hair is already fashionable in all the great civilized cities of the world, and that it will shortly be adopted here. Therefore let your ladies “stand-by” and prepare to drum their ringlets to the front when I give the word. I shall keep a weather eye out for this fashion, for I am an uncompromising enemy of the popular “waterfall,” and I yearn to see it in disgrace. Just think of the disgusting shape and appearance of the thing. The hair is drawn to a slender neck at the back, and then commences a great fat, oblong ball, like a kidney covered with a net; and sometimes this net is so thickly bespangled with white beads that the ball looks soft, and fuzzy, and filmy and gray at a little distance — so that it vividly reminds you of those nauseating garden spiders in the States that go about dragging a pulpy, grayish bag-full of young spiders slung to them behind; and when I look at these suggestive waterfalls and remember how sea-sick it used to make me to mash one of those spider-bags, I feel sea-sick again, as a general thing. Its shape alone is enough to turn one’s stomach. Let’s have the back-hair brought forward as soon as convenient. N. B. — I shall feel much obliged to you if you can aid me in getting up this panic. I have no wife of my own and therefore as long as I have to make the most of other people’s it is a matter of vital importance to me that they should dress with some degree of taste [ET&S 2: 317-20].