Dressmaker: "Twenty-one inches, ma'am. You couldn't breathe with less!"
Lady: "What's Lady Jemima Jones's waist?"
Dressmaker: "Nineteen-and-a-half just now, ma'am. But her Ladyship's a head shorter than you are, and she's got ever so much thinner since her illness last autumn?"
Lady: "Then make it nineteen, Mrs. Price, and I'll engage to get into it!"
The crusade against wearing birds' wings is an old story. The Baroness Burdett-Coutts' efforts in 1875—cordially supported by Punch—were prompted by the cruel practice of obtaining rare feathers by plucking birds when alive. The Baroness had approached Mme. Louise, who was sympathetic but pointed out that there was an increasing demand for this kind of decoration. Punch repeatedly protests against the practice, and in 1889, when flowers were once more in fashion as hat trimmings, expressed his delight at a change which checked wholesale bird slaughter:—
When lovely woman stooped to folly,
And piled bird plumes upon her head,
She no doubt fancied she looked jolly,
But filled the woodland choirs with dread.