a meagre frame, thin face, with high
cheek-bones, a dry, dark complexion, straight hair, small eyes, and as
for repose, he has never heard of it; he is overwhelmingly,
never-endingly restless. With this enumeration my statement that he
is handsome may not appear to accord. Nevertheless, he is a good-looking
fellow; his spare form is often tall, the quickly turning eyes are
wonderfully brilliant, the dark face is lighted by the gleam of white
teeth, the gait is very graceful, the step light. The Albanian costume,
which was adopted after the revolution as the national dress for the
whole country, is amazing. We have all seen it in paintings and
photographs, where it is merely picturesque. But when you meet it in the
streets every day, when you see the wearer of it engaged in cooking his
dinner, in cleaning fish, in driving a cart, in carrying a hod, or
hanging out clothes on a line, then it becomes perfectly fantastic. The
climax of my own impressions about it was reached, I think, a little
later, at Athens, when I beheld the guards walking their beats before
the King's palace, and before the simple house of the Crown Prince
opposite; they are soldiers of the regular army, and they held their
muskets with military precision as they marched to and fro, attired in
ordinary overcoats (it happened to be a rainy day) over the puffed-out
white skirts of a ballet-dancer. Robert Louis Stevenson, in one of his
recent letters from the South Seas, writes that "the mind of the female
missionary" (British) "tends to be constantly busied about dress; she
can be taught with extreme difficulty to think any costume decent but
that to which she grew accustomed on Clapham Common, and, to gratify
this prejudice, the native is put to useless expense." And here it
occurs to me that it is high time to explore this Clapham Common. We go
as worshippers to Shakespeare's Avon; we go to the land of Scott and
Burns; we know the "stripling Thames at Bablockhithe," where "the punt's
rope chops round"; but to Clapham Common we make, I think, no
pilgrimages, although it has as clearly marked a place in English
literature as the Land of Beulah or the Slough of Despond. I fancy that
Americans are not so closely tied to a fixed standard in dress as are
the missionaries who excite Mr. Stevenson's wrath. A half of our
population seeks its ideal in Paris, but as a whole we are easy-going.
We accept the Chinese attire in our streets without demur; the lack of
at