shopping to do, to complete my outfit for the journey,--a
very little shopping,--only a nightcap or two. Ordinarily such a thing
is a matter of small moment, but in my case the subject bad swollen
into unnatural dimensions. Nightcaps are not generally considered
healthy,--at least not by physicians. Nature has given to the head its
sufficient and appropriate covering, the hair. Anything more than this
injures the head, by confining the heat, preventing the soothing,
cooling contact of air, and so deranging the circulation of the blood.
Therefore I have always heeded the dictates of Nature, which I have
supposed to be to brush out the hair thoroughly at night and let it
fly. But there are serious disadvantages connected with this course.
For Nature will be sure to whisk the hair away from your ears where you
want it, and into your eyes where you don't want it, besides crowning
you with magnificent disorder in the morning. But as I have always
believed that no evil exists without its remedy, I had long been
exercising my inventive genius in attempts to produce a head-gear which
should at once protect the ears, confine the hair, and let the skull
alone. I regret to say that my experiments were an utter failure,
notwithstanding the amount of science and skill brought to bear upon
them. One idea lay at the basis of all my endeavors. Every
combination, however elaborate or intricate, resolved into its simplest
elements, consisted of a pair of rosettes laterally to keep the ears
warm, a bag posteriorly to put the hair into, and some kind of a string
somewhere to hold the machine together. Every possible shape into
which lace or muslin or sheeting could be cut or plaited or sewed or
twisted, into which crewel or cord could be crocheted or netted or
tatted, I make bold to declare was essayed, until things came to such a
pass that every odd bit of dry good lying round the house was, in the
absence of any positive testimony on the subject, assumed to be one of
my nightcaps; an utterly baseless assumption, because my achievements
never went so far as concrete capuality, but stopped short in the later
stages of abstract idealism. However, prejudice is stronger than
truth; and, as I said, every fragment of every fabric that could not
give an account of itself was charged with being a nightcap till it was
proved to be a dish-cloth or a cart-rope. I at length surrendered at
discretion, and remembered that somewhere in my reading