ns or roses, and
jewels in the hair--and I think the lady walks. Yet so difficult do I
find it to lead her tripping out of the wardrobe into the world, I
would remind myself of the laws for servants in this time:

'And no servant may toy with the maids under pain of
fourpence.'

It is a salutary warning, and one that must be kept in the mind's eye,
and as I pluck the lady from the old print, hold her by the Dutch
waist, and twirl her round until the Catherine-wheel fardingale is a
blurred circle, and the pickadell a mist of white linen, I feel, for
my prying, like one who has toyed under pain of fourpence.

[Illustration: {High collar and head-dress for a woman}]

There are many excellent people with the true historical mind who
would pick up my lady and strip her in so passionless a way as to
leave her but a mass of Latin names--so many bones, tissues, and
nerves--and who would then label and classify her wardrobe under so
many old English and French, Dutch and Spanish names, bringing to bear
weighty arguments several pages long over the derivation of the word
'cartoose' or 'pickadell,' write in notebooks of her little secret
fineries, bear down on one another with thundering eloquence upon the
relation of St. Catherine and her wheel upon seventeenth-century
dressmaking, and so confuse and bewilder the more simple and less
learned folk that we should turn away from the Eve of the seventeenth
century and from the heap of clothes upon the floor no whit the wiser
for all their pains.

Not that I would laugh, even smile, at the diligence of these learned
men who in their day puzzled the father of Tristram Shandy over the
question of breeches, but, as it is in my mind impossible to
disassociate the clothes and the woman, I find it difficult to follow
their dissertations, however enlightening, upon Early English
cross-stitch. And now, after I have said all this, I find myself doing
very nearly the same thing.

You will find, if you look into the lady's wardrobe, that she has
other fashions than the close sleeve: she has a close sleeve as an
under sleeve, with a long hanging sleeve falling from the elbow; she
has ruffs at her wrist of pointed lace, more cuffs than ruffs, indeed.
She does not always follow the fashion of the short Dutch waist as she
has, we can see, a dress with a long waist and a tapering front to
the bodice. Some dresses of hers are divided in the skirts to show a
barred petticoat, or a pet