each of those
fifty years! Two hundred illustrations must be shown in order to give
a correct idea of the dress of the time! Perhaps it might be more
satisfactory to devote a volume exclusively to the subject.

If only we did not run on so quickly! We seem to get faster every
year. In a very little time, what we wear one day will be quite out of
date the next! When we arrive at this climax, there will be a sudden
convulsion of nature, I should think, and we shall return once more to
the more simple garb of the aborigines. What an amount of trouble it
would save us! No worrying because the dressmaker has not sent our
gowns home in time! No sending them back to be altered! No
dressmaker's or tailor's bills; or at the least, very small ones; for
"woad" could not ruin us _very_ much.

So on the whole it would be well perhaps if this revolution did occur.
Some such convulsion as geologists declare has already frequently
befallen our earth; and, as they prophesy, is shortly coming again.

I do not like talking to these scientific men. They make you feel so
infinitesimally small. They go back such a long, long way. They make
out that from the Creation (which by the way they do not admit, only
considering it another great change in the world springing from
natural causes), from the Creation until now, is the space of a moment
on the great clock of time, is a mere "parenthesis in eternity."

It is not nice to feel such a nonentity. What are our lives, our
little lives in comparison? We, who each consider ourselves the one
person upon the earth, the hero or heroine in the great drama: all the
rest mere by-characters. We do not care to be considered of such
little consequence; only puppets appearing on the stage for one moment
and taken off the next. We are like the clergyman in the small island
off the North of Scotland, who prayed for the inhabitants "of Great
Cumbray and Little Cumbray and the neighboring islands of Great
Britain and Ireland!" On our small piece of land, we yet consider
ourselves the centre of the universe.

It is to be hoped if this revolution occurs, after all, that the
climate will change likewise. We should require something more besides
blue paint in most of our English winters!

Perhaps we take too much thought for what we shall put on. They say
that nothing but the prevailing and forthcoming fashions fill the
feminine mind. It is true sometimes, I daresay, and yet I always agree
with our immortal