PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 151 



them with woolen trappings at a time when even a linen robe becomes 

 a Nessus-shirt. There is a story of a glutton being cured by a friend 

 who persuaded him to eat and drink nothing for twenty-four hours 

 without putting an equivalent in quantity and quality into an earthen 

 crock, and the next day made him inspect the collectanea ; and on the 

 same principle a person of common-sense might perhaps be redeemed 

 from the slavery of the dress-mania, by making him wrap up his com- 

 plete suit of traps and weigh the bundle : he would find that the sum- 

 mer dress of a fashionable gentleman outweighs the winter coat of the 

 most hirsute brute of the wilderness. A grizzly bear, shorn to the 

 skin, would yield about ten pounds of hair and wool ; but a dandy's 

 accoutrements flannel undershirt, drawers, shoes, stockings, starched 

 overshirt, waistcoat, cravat, black dress-coat, and pantaloons ^would 

 weigh at least fourteen pounds. Habit mitigates the evil, though 

 there are times when the martyrs of fashion suffer more in a single 

 hour than a ragged Comanche in the coldest winter week ; but, for 

 boys and young girls, calorific food and woolen clothes certainly make 

 the sunniest days the saddest in the year. 



The vicissitudes of the weather ? It is worth a journey to Trieste 

 to see the youngsters of the suburbs enjoy their evenings on the Capo 

 Liddo, the sandy headland between the Pola pike-road and the harbor 

 fortifications : four or five hundred half-wild boys, splashing in the 

 surf, throwing stones, wrestling, or chasing each other along the shore, 

 all shouting and cheering, merry as carnivallers, though there is not 

 a pair of shoes or a dozen hats in the crowd. Swift-footed, lithe, and 

 indefatigable, they are the very picture of careless health ; you can 

 see them at play almost every evening, even in winter, when the Tra- 

 montane raises the snow-drifts of the Karst. They laugh at summer 

 showers ; their linen jackets will dry before they get home. Sunshine 

 makes them a holiday ; but let your well-dressed New York or Paris 

 schoolboy join in their sports, and examine his clothes after an hour 

 or two, and see if perspiration has not made his undershirts as wet as 

 any rain could make his jacket. 



Decency? Are the gambols of a barefoot boy more unseemly 

 than the contortions of a sunstruck alderman in his holiday dress ? 

 Can ethics or aesthetics be promoted by the imprecations of a sleepless 

 victim of flannel night-shirts and closed bedroom windows ? If daily 

 misery can spoil the temper of a saint, the ladies of the American 

 Dress-Reform are working in the interest of charity and good-humor 

 by removing a chief incentive to the opposite sentiments, for the 

 aggravations of Tantalus must have been trifling compared with those 

 of an American schoolgirl d la mode, at the thought of a mountain 

 meadow to run on with naked feet or a shady brook to pick pebbles 

 from with bared arms. Pocahontas, indeed, had no need to envy the 

 " fair maids in the land of her lover," if the fair ones had to wear the 

 twenty-three distinct pieces of dry-goods which, according to a cor- 



