and wound up by insisting upon a uniform dress for both sexes. I tell
you, if you'd worked for years to establish a dignified newspaper
the way I have, it would have broken your heart to see the suggested
fashion-plates that woman printed. The uniform dress was a holy terror.
It was a combination of all the worst features of modern garb. Trousers
were to be universal and compulsory; sensible masculine coats were
discarded entirely, and puffed-sleeved dress-coats were substituted.
Stiff collars were abolished in favor of ribbons, and rosettes cropped
up everywhere. Imagine it if you can--and everybody in all Hades was to
be forced into garments of that sort!"

"I should enjoy seeing it," I said.

"Possibly--but you wouldn't enjoy wearing it," retorted the machine.
"And then that woman's funny column--it was frightful. You never saw
such jokes in your life; every one of them contained a covert attack
upon man. There was only one good thing in it, and that was a bit of
verse called 'Fair Play for the Little Girls.' It went like this:

"'If little boys, when they are young,
Can go about in skirts,
And wear upon their little backs
Small broidered girlish shirts,
Pray why cannot the little girls,
When infants, have a chance
To toddle on their little ways
In little pairs of pants?'"

"That isn't at all bad," said I, smiling in spite of poor Boswell's woe.
"If the rest of the paper was on a par with that I don't see why the
circulation fell off."

"Well, she took liberties, that's all," said Boswell. "For instance, in
her 'Side Talks with Men' she had something like this: 'Napoleon--It
is rather difficult to say just what you can do with your last season's
cocked-hat. If you were to purchase five yards of one-inch blue ribbon,
cut it into three strips of equal length, and fasten one end to each
of the three corners of the hat, tying the other ends into a choux, it
would make a very acceptable work-basket to send to your grandmother
at Christmas.' Now Napoleon never asked that woman for advice on the
subject. Then there was an answer to a purely fictitious inquiry from
Solomon which read: 'It all depends on local custom. In Salt Lake City,
and in London at the time of Henry the Eighth, it was not considered
necessary to be off with the old love before being on with the new, but
latterly the growth of monopolistic ideas tends towards the uniform rate
of one at a time.' A