villainies.

Reader, have you ever purchased a pair of pajamas in London? This is
homely stuff I write, yet there's pathos in it. That jaunty air betokens
the beginning of your search before question and reiteration have dulled
your spirits. Later, there will be less sparkle in your eye. What! Do not
the English wear pajamas? Does not the sex that is bifurcated by day keep
by night to its manly bifurcation? Is not each separate leg swathed in
complete divorcement from its fellow? Or, womanish, do they rest in the
common dormitory of a shirt _de nuit_? The Englishman _does_ wear pajamas,
but the word with him takes on an Icelandic meaning. They are built to the
prescription of an Esquimo. They are woolly, fuzzy and the width of a
finger thick. If I were a night-watchman, "doom'd for a certain term to
walk the night," I should insist on English pajamas to keep me awake. If
Saint Sebastian, who, I take it, wore sackcloth for the glory of his soul,
could have lighted on the pair of pajamas that I bought on Oxford Circus,
his halo would have burned the brighter.

Just how the feathery and billowy nights of our great-grandparents were
changed into the present is too deep for explanation. Perhaps Annie left a
door or window open--such neglect fitting with her other heedlessness--and
notwithstanding this means of entry, it was found in the morning that no
sprite or ooph had got in to pinch the noses of the sleepers. At least,
there was no evidence of such a visitation, unless the snoring that
abounded all the night did proceed from the pinching of the nose (the
nasal orifice being so clamped betwixt the forefinger and the thumb of
these devilish sprites that the breath was denied its proper channel).
Unless snoring was so caused, it is clear that no ooph had clambered
through the window.

Or perhaps some brave man--a brother to him who first ate an oyster--put
up the window out of bravado to snap thereby his fingers at the forms of
darkness, and being found whole and without blemish or mark of witch upon
his throat and without catarrhal snuffling in his nose, of a consequence
the harsh opinion against the night softened.

Or maybe some younger woman threw up her window to listen to the slim
tenor of moonlight passion with such strumming business as
accompanied--tinkling of cithern or mandolin--and so with chin in hand,
she sighed her soul abroad, to the result that the closing was forgotten.
It is like enough that her dream