TYRANNY OF CLOTHES.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LIII, Issue 9304, 11 March 1907, Page 6

TYRANNY OF CLOTHES.

"In iiis 'Descent of Man' (writes Mrs John Lane, in the Fortnightly Review for •January) Darwin alludes to the fine feathers of the rooster who takes this way to make himself irresistible to the susceptible hens. Once during a periodical cleaning of our library, I came in unexpectedly, and fourd that the housemaid had paused in hieir dusting, and was reading this particular passage aloud to our old cook, who came up from the kitchen to lend a helping hand, and who shook a reproachful feather duster at her.

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

"I remembr the despairing cry of a woman, looking hopelessly through her wardiobe, 'I should have been a belter woman if I had been born wHh feathers!' She was examining disconsolately a shabby white satin dress — the kind of satin that betrays its plebeian cotton origin — 1 wish I were a guinea-hen with respectable speckled f Gathers/ she cried, 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 chiurch in anything but her best (adds Mrs Lane). It is, apparently, impossible to get one's mind in a fitting religious condition unless ore's clothes can triumphantly sustain th© scrutiny of the righteous. Whoever heard of a right-minded, woman going to church in her old clothes? And who has not heard the familiar reproach, 'My dear, yon really can't go to church ; you haven't anything fit to wear !' On the other hand, who has not owned some perfectly fitting dress which has given its -wiM/rea* on a Sunday that sense of peace and holy contentment which is not in th© power of the sermon to bestow'

"Once I met a man wtuo was lured from the joys of Piccadilly, just as. h© stood in frock coat and tcp hat, to a. rural (retreat, five njiles from a railway station. I never saw anything so unbecoming to a landscape as that wretched nat and that superlatively rigid ooat. It was in vain that we took him for walka and showed him the hills. He persisted in sitting disconsolately on a strilo, and^l shall never forget the abysi \ai gloom with which hq watched the innoo nt gambols of a litter of young pigs. A n 10 not without a sense of humor, and if Ms distinguished head had been covered b? a straw hat he would have oeen the first to love the little pigs. As it was, he wandered tragically through the village street entirely out of drawing, and a terror any? perplexity even to the chickens. He rather ructely refused the loan of a straw hat as being humanly impassible with a. frock ooat, and he only cheered up the 'next day when he climbed into the train.

" 'Good-bye,' he said, in an impolite burst of rapture. 1 fear my isoul has not been in narmony with nature.'

" 'Don't blamo your soul/ I said, cheerfully, as we shook hands; 'your soul was all right, but you had on tlie wrong hat.' ''