-pinned
to his person: a routine business, dull, wearisome with repetition. His
face and hands must be washed, his hair and teeth brushed: many, indeed,
will perform all over what Keats, thinking of the ocean eternally
washing the land, has called a 'priestlike task of pure ablution'; but
others, faithful to tradition and Saturday night, will dodge this as
wasteful. Downstairs in summer is his hat; in winter, his hat, his
overcoat, his muffler, and, if the weather compels, his galoshes and
perhaps his ear-muffs or ear-bobs. Last thing of all, the Perfect
Gentleman will put on his walking-stick; somewhere in this routine he
will have shaved and powdered, buckled his wrist-watch, and adjusted his
spats.

When we think of the shortness of life, and how, even so, we might
improve our minds by study between getting up and breakfast, dressing,
as educators are beginning to say of the long summer vacation, seems a
sheer 'wastage of education'; yet the plain truth is that we wouldn't
get up. Better, if we can, to _think_ while we dress, pausing to jot
down our worth-while thoughts on a handy tablet. Once, I remember,--and
perhaps the pleasant custom continues,--a lady might modestly express
her kindly feeling for a gentleman (and her shy, half-humorous
recognition of the difference between them) by giving him shaving-paper;
why not a somewhat similar tablet, to record his dressing-thoughts?

'Clothes,' so wrote Master Thomas Fuller,--and likely enough the idea
occurred to him some morning while getting into his hose and
doublet,--'ought to be our remembrancers of our lost innocency.' And so
they are; for Adam must have bounded from bed to breakfast with an
innocency that nowadays we can only envy.

Yet, in sober earnest, the first useful thing that ever this naked
fellow set his hand to was the making of his own apron. The world, as
we know and love it, began--your pardon, Mr. Kipling, but I cannot help
it--when

Cross-legged our Father Adam sat and fastened them one by one,
Till, leaf by leaf, with loving care he got his apron done;
The first new suit the world had seen, and mightily pleased with it,
Till the Devil chuckled behind the Tree, 'It's pretty, but will it fit?'

From that historic moment everything a man does has been preceded by
dressing, and almost immediately the process lost its convenient
simplicity. Not since Adam's apron has any complete garment, or
practical suit of clothes, been devised--excep