366 
COSTUME. 
I wish some of my soda-water-in-the-morning club 
friends coald see me perspiring over a pair of pants, 
doroassing a defunct sock. We do our own sewing, 
clothing ourselves cap-a-pie ; and it astonishes me, 
looking hack upon my dark period of previous igno- 
rance, to feel how much I have learned. I wonder 
whether your friend the Philadelphia D'Orsay knows 
how to adjust with a ruler and a lump of soap the seat 
of a pair of breeches ? 
" Why, I have even made discoveries in — I forget 
the G-reek word for it — the art which made George 
the Fourth so famous. Thus a method, adopted by 
. our mess, of cutting five pair of stockings out of one 
hammock blanket — a thing hitherto deemed impossi- 
ble — is altogether my own. In the abstract or specu- 
lative part of the profession, I claim to be the first who 
has reduced all vestiture to a primitive form — an in- 
tegral particle, as it were. I can't dwell on this mat- 
ter here : it might, perhaps, be out of place ; perhaps, 
too, attributed in some degree to that personal vanity 
almost inseparable from invention. I will tell you, 
however, that this discovered type, this radical nucleus, 
is the 'bag.' Thus a bag, or a couple of parallelo- 
gramic planes sewed together, makes the covering of 
the trunk. Similar bags of scarcely varied proportion 
cover the arms ; ditto the legs ; ditto the hands ; ditto 
the head : thus going on, bags, bags, bags, even to the 
fingers ; a cytoblastic operation, having interesting an- 
alogies with the mycelium of the fungus or the sac- 
cine vegetation of the confervas. 
"All this is a digression, perhaps ; yet I am not the 
first traveler whose breeches have figured in his diary 
of wonders : you remember the geometrical artist of 
Laputa who re-enforced the wardrobe of Mr. Grulliver. 
