Sauntering up the street of a small German town one day, two English ladies saw, a couple of hundred yards away, a party of men standing admiring an ancient gateway.
“They must be English.”
“They must be English,” said one of the ladies; and before she could finish her sentence the other finished it for her in the very words she had been about to utter: “They are so beautifully clean!”
The close-cropped head.
This characteristic is carried to an extreme in the close clipping of the hair; but as fashion ordains that it must be worn very short, its behests must be obeyed by all who wish to be in society and of it.
The “long-haired fellow.”
“Who is that long-haired fellow?” is the question invariably asked about any man whose visits to the barber are infrequent. “Must be an artist or a music man,” is the frequent commentary. Sometimes he is merely careless of conventionalities, and by being so proves that he is rather “out of it” where good society is concerned. The rule appears to be that directly a man finds that he has any hair worth brushing, he must immediately go and have it cut. It would be much more becoming if allowed to grow a little longer, but things being as they are, only the few can afford to defy the ordinary custom.
IN OR ON AN OMNIBUS.
The humble omnibus.
The humble omnibus may be thought by some readers too democratic a kind of conveyance to be considered in a book on Manners. Not at all! There are several reasons why it should have a place in such a volume.