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essed in the style in which you see her in the picture, the difference between her and the other ladies would be very striking, to say the least. [Illustration: THE WOMAN WHO LOOKED LIKE A CAT.] The curious methods of dress in olden times were so many, and were of such infinite variety, that I cannot even allude to them in a little article like this; but you cannot look at very many pictures of the people of by-gone days without seeing some costume which will appear quite funny, if not absolutely absurd. You need not go very far back either. What could be queerer than the high coat-collars of some of your great-grandfathers, which came up under their ears, while their throats were wrapped in fold after fold of long cravats--or else encircled by a hard, stiff stock,--and the hind-buttons of their coats were away up in the middle of their backs! But perhaps your great-grandmothers, with the waists of their gowns just under their arms, with their funny long mittens and their great calash bonnets, were just as queer as their husbands. Now the question comes very naturally to us: Why did these people, as well as the people who came before them, dress in such ridiculous fashions? We know that many of them were very sensible folk, who knew how to do many things as well as we can do them, and some things a great deal better. Mentally and physically the most of them are not surpassed by the people who live now. Then why did not they know enough to dress sensibly and becomingly as we do? In reply to this I will say that your great-grandfather and your great-grandmother, unless they belonged to some religious sect which regulated the clothes of its members, would have dressed exactly as your father and mother now do, if it had been the fashion in their day. And if you had seen their portraits, dressed in clothes of the present day (which, had those old people worn them, would have been out of fashion long before you were born), you would have thought they looked perfectly ridiculous. The truth of the matter is, that with a great many of us the attractive and desirable qualities of clothes depend entirely upon their relations to the current styles or fashions. We think everything unbecoming and ugly excepting those styles; and no matter how absurd the present fashion may be, there are not ten persons out of a thousand who, when they become used to them, do not admire them and follow them to the extent of their abil
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