ROYAL
BAKING POWDER
is indispensable
in their preparation.
ROYAL BAKING POWDER CO., NEW YORK.
[QUESTIONS FOR YOUNG MEN.]
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.