lor after supper in shining raiment, and it is
shine, shine, shine, all the way between, and a different shine each
time. You may well suppose that I was like an owl among birds of
Paradise, for what little finery I had was in my (eminently)
travelling-trunk: yet, though it was but a dory, compared with the
Noah's arks that drove up every day, I felt that, if I could only once
get inside of it, I could make things fly to some purpose. Like poor
Rabette, I would show the city that the country too could wear clothes!
I never walked down Broadway without seeing a dozen white trunks, and
every white trunk that I saw I was fully convinced was mine, if I could
only get at it. By and by mine came, and I blossomed. I arrayed
myself for morning, noon, and night, and everything else that came up,
and was, as the poet says,--

"Prodigious in change,
And endless in range,"--

for I would have scorned not to be as good as the best. The result
was, that in three days I touched bottom. But then we went away, and
my reputation was saved. I don't believe anybody ever did a larger
business on a smaller capital; but I put a bold face on it. I cherish
the hope that nobody suspected I could not go on in that ruinous way
all summer,--I, who in three days had mustered into service every dress
and sash and ribbon and that I had had in three years or expected to
have in three more. But I never will, if I can help it, hold my head
down where other people are holding their heads up.

I would not be understood as decrying or depreciating dress. It is a
duty as well as a delight. Mrs. Madison is reported to have said that
she would never forgive a young lady who did not dress to please, or
one who seemed pleased with her dress. And not only young ladies, but
old ladies and old gentlemen, and everybody, ought to make their dress
a concord and not a discord. But Saratoga is pitched on a perpetual
falsetto, and stuns you. One becomes sated with an interminable piece
de resistance of full dress. At the seaside you bathe; at the
mountains you put on stout boots and coarse frocks and go a-fishing;
but Saratoga never "lets up,"--if I may be pardoned the phrase.
Consequently, you see much of crinoline and little of character. You
have to get at the human nature just as Thoreau used to get at
bird-nature and fish-nature and turtle-nature, by sitting perfectly
still in one place and waiting patiently till it comes out. You see
more