or some other influential ass, introduced sombre hues
and discomfort and ugly designs into masculine clothing. The meek public
surrendered to the outrage, and by consequence we are in that odious
captivity to-day, and are likely to remain in it for a long time to
come.

Fortunately the women were not included in the disaster, and so their
graces and their beauty still have the enhancing help of delicate
fabrics and varied and beautiful colors. Their clothing makes a great
opera audience an enchanting spectacle, a delight to the eye and the
spirit, a Garden of Eden for charm and color. The men, clothed in dismal
black, are scattered here and there and everywhere over the Garden, like
so many charred stumps, and they damage the effect, but cannot
annihilate it.

In summer we poor creatures have a respite, and may clothe ourselves in
white garments; loose, soft, and in some degree shapely; but in the
winter--the sombre winter, the depressing winter, the cheerless winter,
when white clothes and bright colors are especially needed to brighten
our spirits and lift them up--we all conform to the prevailing insanity,
and go about in dreary black, each man doing it because the others do
it, and not because he wants to. They are really no sincerer than
Sackcloth and Ashes. At bottom the Sackcloths do not care to exhibit
their emotions when I am performing before them, they only do it because
Ashes started it.

I would like to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks
and velvets, resplendent with all the stunning dyes of the rainbow, and
so would every sane man I have ever known; but none of us dares to
venture it. There is such a thing as carrying conspicuousness to the
point of discomfort; and if I should appear on Fifth Avenue on a Sunday
morning, at church-time, clothed as I would like to be clothed, the
churches would be vacant, and I should have all the congregations
tagging after me, to look, and secretly envy, and publicly scoff. It is
the way human beings are made; they are always keeping their real
feelings shut up inside, and publicly exploiting their fictitious ones.

Next after fine colors, I like plain white. One of my sorrows, when the
summer ends, is that I must put off my cheery and comfortable white
clothes and enter for the winter into the depressing captivity of the
shapeless and degrading black ones. It is mid-October now, and the
weather is growing cold up here in the New Hampshire hills, b