that a man is to be styled "dressed" when he
has only got a proper coat on his back; something more than this is
necessary ere he can claim a place in the _beau monde_, or can decently
figure in a _bal pare_. There is no one, indeed, but your mere
Hottentot, who considers himself the pink of fashion solely from the
fact of throwing something, more or less becoming, over his shoulders;
though, by the way, we once heard of a negro chief who, in a state of
unclad majesty, clapped a gold-laced cocked-hat on his head, and then
strutted about with an air of intense satisfaction at the result of his
habilimentary effort. He was not a well-dressed man this chief, any more
than our friend the Frenchman in the diligence; but we will tell you
this aesthetic story, gentle reader.

It was our destiny once--as it has been, too, of many a son of
perfidious Albion--to be journeying across the monotonous plains of
Upper Burgundy, _en route_ for the gay capital. 'Twas a summer morn, and
the breezy call of the incense-breathing lady, as Gray the poet calls
her, came delightfully upon our heated forehead, as we pushed down the
four-paned rattling window of that clumsy typefication of slowness,
misnamed a diligence, to escape from the stifling atmosphere of the
_rotonde_. Our fellow-travellers consisted of a couple of greasy,
black-haired, sallow-faced cures, two farmers' wives with a puking child
each, our own portly self, and the sixth passenger. Now, this sixth
individual, who was in reality the eighth Christian immured in this
quasi Black-hole, was one of those nondescript Parisian existences, to
define whom is almost impossible to those who have never witnessed the
animal. He might have been a _commis-voyageur_, or a clerk in the
passport-office, or the keeper of a small cafe, or an _epicier_, but he
did not look stupid enough for the last. Be this as it may, he was short
rather than tall, lean rather than fat,--in a shabby brown
surtout--smoked and took snuff--had been in Dauphine--thought the
Germans a set of European Chinese--considered a national guard as the
model of a good soldier--kept spitting out of the window from time to
time--stretched his legs most inconveniently against ours--tied his head
up at dark in a dirty bird's-eye blue cotton _mouchoir-de-poche_, and
snored throughout the night. He told us that he had not washed or shaved
himself since leaving Lyons, two days before; and in the morning, just
as we were opening the