TYRANNY OF CLOTHES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 59, 25 March 1907, Page 4

TYRANNY OF CLOTHES.

"In Ilis 'Descent of Man' (writes Mrs John Lane, in the Fortnightly Review for January) Damn alludes to "tho fine feathers of tho rooster who take.; (his way to make himself irresistible to the susceptible hens. Once during a periodical cleaning of our library, I carao in unexpectedly, and four.d that tho housemaid had paused in her dusting, and was reading this particular passage aloud to our old cook, who came up from tho kitchen to lend a helping hand, and who sliook a reproachful feather duster at her.

"You just shut that book up," cook cried in outraged propriety to tho blushing housemaid. 'He'd oughter be ashamed of himself ;-aying such things.' By which she meant the great Darwin. Since then, by an odd association of ideas, I always connect viituo with a feather-duster.

"I rcmembr the despairing cry of a woman, looking hopelessly through her wardiobe, 'I should have been a better , woman if I bad been born v'th feathers She was examining disconsolately a shabby white satin dress—the kind of satin that betrays its plebeian cotton origin—'l wish I were a guinea-hen with respectable speckled foathera,' she oried, as she gave a discouraged slam to the wardrobe door, 'then I wouldn't use up thiee-quarters of my intellect getting the wrong things cheap!'" "It takes a heroic woman to go to church 1 in anything but her best (adds Mrs Lane). It is, apparently, impossible to get one'a mind in a fitting religious condition unless ono's clothes can triumphantly sustain tho scrutiny of tho righteous. Whoever heard of a right-minded woman going to church i.n tvpr *>ld ? And. who not hoard the familiar reproach, 'My dear, you rwdly can't go to church; you haven't anything fit to wear!' On the other hand, who has not owned sonio perfectly fitting drea which has given its vnarer on a Sunday that sense of peace and holy contentment which i> not in tho power of the icmon to bestow? "Once I met a man who was lured from the joys of Piccadilly, just as ho stood in frock coat and tcp hat, to a rural retreat, five miles from a railway station. I never saw anything so unbecoming to a landscape as that wretched hat arid that superlatively rigid him for walkd and showed nim tho hills. Ho persisted in sitting disconsolately on a stile, c,nd 1 shall never forget the abysmal gloom with which he watched the innocent gambols of a litter of young pigs. A man not without a sense of humor, and if his distinguished head had been covered by a straw hat he would have been the first to love the little pigs. As it was, he wandered tragically through the village street entirely out of drawing, and a terror and perplexity even to tho chickens. He rather rudiely refused the loan of a straw hat as being humanly impossible with a frocli coat, and he only cheered up tho next day when he climbed into the train. "'Good-bye,' he said, in an impolite burst of rapture. 'I fear my soul lias not been in harmony with nature.' "'Don't blame your soul/ I said, cheerfully, as wo shook hands; 'your soul was all right, but you had on the wrong hat.'"