ght the ear of a group of eager
listeners. A shy New England bluebird, shifting its light load of song,
has for the moment been mistaken for a stray nightingale.

THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD

I WENT to see a play the other night, one of those good old-fashioned
English comedies that are in five acts and seem to be in fifteen. The
piece with its wrinkled conventionality, its archaic stiffness,
and obsolete code of morals, was devoid of interest excepting as a
collection of dramatic curios. Still I managed to sit it through.
The one thing in it that held me a pleased spectator was the graceful
costume of a certain player who looked like a fine old portrait--by
Vandyke or Velasquez, let us say--that had come to life and kicked off
its tarnished frame.

I do not know at what epoch of the world's history the scene of the play
was laid; possibly the author originally knew, but it was evident that
the actors did not, for their make-ups represented quite antagonistic
periods. This circumstance, however, detracted only slightly from the
special pleasure I took in the young person called Delorme. He was
not in himself interesting; he was like that Major Waters in "Pepys's
Diary"--"a most amorous melancholy gentleman who is under a despayr in
love, which makes him bad company;" it was entirely Delorme's dress.

I never saw mortal man in a dress more sensible and becoming. The
material was according to Polonius's dictum, rich but not gaudy, of some
dark cherry-colored stuff with trimmings of a deeper shade. My idea of
a doublet is so misty that I shall not venture to affirm that the
gentleman wore a doublet. It was a loose coat of some description
hanging negligently from the shoulders and looped at the throat,
showing a tasteful arrangement of lacework below and at the wrists. Full
trousers reaching to the tops of buckskin boots, and a low-crowned soft
hat--not a Puritan's sugar-loaf, but a picturesque shapeless head-gear,
one side jauntily fastened up with a jewel--completed the essential
portions of our friend's attire. It was a costume to walk in, to ride
in, to sit in. The wearer of it could not be awkward if he tried, and I
will do Delorme the justice to say that he put his dress to some severe
tests. But he was graceful all the while, and made me wish that my
countrymen would throw aside their present hideous habiliments and
hasten to the measuring-room of Delorme's tailor.

In looking over the plates of an old