“Why will ladies wear those ugly brown veils, which look like the burnt edge of a buckwheat cake? We vote for green ones.”—Exchange.
Mr. Critic: Why don’t you hit upon something objectionable? Such as the passion which stout ladies have for wearing immense plaids, and whole stories of flounces! Such as thin, bolster-like looking females-wearing narrow’ stripes! Such as brunettes, gliding round like ghosts, in pale blue! Such as blondes blowing out like dandelions in bright yellow! Such as short ladies swathing up their little fat necks in voluminous folds of shawls, and shingle women rejoicing in strips of mantles!
Then the gentlemen!
Your stout man is sure to get into a frock coat, with baggy trousers; your May-pole, into a long-waisted body-coat, and “continuations” unnecessarily compact; your dark man looks like an “east wind” daguerreotyped, in a light blue neck-tie; while your pink-and-white man looks as though he wanted a pitcher of water in his face.
Now allow me to suggest. Your thin man should always close the thorax button of his coat, and the last two at his waistband, leaving the intermediate open, to give what he needs—more breadth of chest. Your stout man, who has almost always a nice arm and hand, should have his coat sleeve a perfect fit from the elbow to the wrist, buttoning there tightly—allowing a nice strip of a white linen wristband below it.
I understand the architecture of a coat to a charm; know as quick as a flash whether ’tis all right, the minute I clap my eye on it. As to vests, I call myself a connoisseur. “Stocks” are only fit for Wall Street! Get yourself some nice silk neck-ties, and ask your wife, or somebody who knows something, to longitudinize them to your jugular. Throw your coloured, embroidered, and ruffled shirt-bosoms overboard; leave your cane and cigar at home; wear a pair of neat, dark gloves; sport an immaculate pocket-handkerchief and dickey—don’t say naughty words—give us ladies the inside of the walk—speak of every woman as you would wish your mother or your sister spoken of, and you’ll do!
INCIDENT AT THE FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY.
To be able to appreciate Mr. Pease’s toils, and sacrifices, and self-denying labours at the Five Points House of Industry, one must visit the locality—one must wind through those dirty streets and alleys, and see the wrecks of humanity that meet him at every step—he must see children so dirty and squalid that they scarcely resemble human beings, playing in filthy gutters, and using language that would curdle his blood to hear from childhood’s lips—he should see men, “made in God’s own image,” brutalised beyond his power to imagine—he should see women (girls of not more than twenty years) reeling about the pavements in a state of beastly intoxication, without a trace of feminity in their vicious faces—he should pass the rum shops, where men and women are quarrelling, and fighting, and swearing, while childhood listens and learns!—he should pass the second-hand clothes cellars, where hard-featured Jewish dealers swing out faded, refuse garments (pawned by starving virtue for bread), to sell to the needy, half-naked emigrant for his last penny—he should see decayed fruit and vegetables which the most ravenous swine might well root twice over before devouring, purchased as daily food by these poor creatures—he should see gentlemen (?) threading these streets, not to make all this misery less, God knows, but to sever the last thread of hope to which many a tempted one is despairingly clinging.
One must see all this before he can form a just idea of the magnitude and importance of the work that Mr. Pease has single-handed and nobly undertaken; remembering that men of wealth and influence have their own reasons for using that wealth and influence to perpetuate this modern Sodom.
One should spend an hour in Mr. Pease’s house, to see the constant draughts upon his time and strength, in the shape of calls and messages, and especially the applications for relief that his slender purse, alas! is often not able to answer;—he should see his unwearied patience and activity, admire the kind, sympathetic heart—unaffected by the toil or the frowns of temporizing theorists—ever warm, ever pitiful, giving not only “the crumbs from his table,” but often his own meals to the hungry—his own wardrobe to the naked;—he should see this, and go away ashamed to have lived so long and done so little to help the maimed, and sick, and lame, to Bethesda’s Pool.