ON DRESS.
There is a certain professor in a certain university of the United States who once, at the beginning of one of his lectures on fine arts, got on the subject of the kind of pins worn in the neck-ties of young college men. He was a good lecturer, and was always interesting, but this lecture was the most interesting of his course to the three hundred boys who heard him, and the whole hour was spent on neck-tie pins, their use and misuse, and what they suggested. The gist of what he said was that there was no more reason why a boy should wear a horseshoe with a whip across it all in gold than that houses should have sieves for roofs. And that as it was extremely foolish to put a big sieve on your house for a roof, so it was quite as foolish to wear horseshoes on your neck-ties. The principle of this is that you should have a reason in what you wear as well as in other things, and that senseless decorations, like horseshoes on neck-ties or neck-ties on horseshoes, are silly and unbecoming to a self-respecting person. This particular example was only one to illustrate a principle, which is that nothing unusual, queer, out of the ordinary, is in itself a good thing; that, in fact, most things that are queer and out of the ordinary are likely, in the question of dress, to be in bad taste. A man's dress ought to be quiet, but it must be clean and well taken care of in every instance. The best dressed man is the man who, in whatever company he finds himself, is inconspicuous; who, you realize in an indefinite way, is well appointed, though you cannot well tell why. If you appear at a dinner in overalls, people say you are badly dressed, and they would repeat that wise observation if you went out in the field in a swallow-tail-coat. In the same way a man who has a flaring neck-tie or a purple handkerchief, or very long coat or very short trousers, is at once conspicuous, and therefore badly dressed.
This is not a question which involves the expenditure of money. A young man's clothing may be worn threadbare, but it can always be clean, and it costs no more to buy a quiet-colored cloth than to buy a big check of black and green or brown and yellow. If you study the matter a little you will find that you can tell the general character of any person by his clothes. Some men are sure to always wear slouchy clothes, half-soiled linen, a bright green neck-tie; others wear highly colored waistcoats; others again are always in the height of fashion—that is, a little in the extreme year after year; and still others make a point of being badly dressed and out of the prevalent style to show that they are not swayed by such silly laws as style. It is easy enough to place all these men in their proper places. And then, finally, you see some young chap whose clothes are clean, who is neither out of the style of the day nor in the height of it, whose clothes may be showing distinct signs of wear, but who seems to fit them pretty well, and to be noticeable in no particular way so far as they are concerned, and in all probability you put him down, if you think of the matter at all, as a man of common-sense, of decency, of self-respect, and good manners.
Then, again, some men sit in their shirt sleeves at home. There is no reason for this. It is merely a queer idea that you are more comfortable in that style of dress. But such men do not realize that their sisters, wives, mothers, naturally lose some of their respect for them, and that they unconsciously lose a good deal of respect for themselves. Certainly these sisters and wives and mothers are the girls and women we think most of, and why do we treat them with a disrespect that we would never think of subjecting strangers to in our own or in their homes? That disrespect to them is a boomerang, a reflector on us ourselves. If you dress quietly and decently and as well as you can, if you keep yourself and your clothes clean, you are more likely to keep morally clean, to think and act in a dignified way, and to treat others with proper respect. Of course there are great men who are slovenly, but they are never great because they are slovenly, and it would not dull their greatness if they kept themselves clean and orderly. It is because they grow careless, and carelessness is never excusable in any one. Think about your clothes, then, and avoid anything that will make you noticeable. That does not mean that one should always be thinking of what to wear, that one should be a dandy and a fop. It simply means that he should be a self-respecting man who tries to be decent.
Postmen sometimes have very lively experiences in the course of their daily rounds. It has often happened that on lonely roads they have had to fight their way against tramps and others who lie in wait to see what they can get that doesn't belong to them, and may be worth having. The most novel experience that has come to notice, however, was in the work of an English postman. It appears that on a recent Sunday a swarm of bees took possession of the village letter-box at Haunton, six miles from Tamworth. There is no collection on Sunday, and on Monday night, when the rural postman essayed to take out the letters, he was compelled to beat a speedy retreat, and no one could approach within twenty yards of the box. The postman avers that that was the liveliest mail he has had to do with in a long while.