WHISKERS AND MUSTACHIOS

Assent being given, they went across to what was then vacant ground on the Mound, where four rats were disposed of, which came from the man's tail and breast pockets. Being asked if he would care for more, the gentleman said, “I'll take every one you have," whereupon the salesman leaned forward and took off his hat, producing two more rats out of it, which had been seated on his head.

Fashion is a cruel taskmaster both of man and woman. And much that it imposed upon both sexes appears to us to-day to be eminently absurd. But I think that some of the ladies would be willing to confess that not a few of the changes in their fashions, which have followed one another with kaleidoscope rapidity, were at least as absurd, if not more absurd than those of our mothers. Of these changes more anon.

Nor was fashion in those days confined to dress in the case of the male. There were strict face fashions also. Whiskers, generally mutton-chop, as distinguished from the later Lord Dundrearypendants, were the usual hirsute ornament (?). Mustachios were the head-mark of cavalry. There can be little doubt that if a clergyman had appeared in church wearing a moustache, his charge would have seethed with condemnatory excitement. Perhaps it may be thought to be an exaggeration to say that he would have been called before the Presbytery, to answer for so unseemly

an offence against propriety. But I feel that I do not exaggerate. He would not have escaped censure. If any minister had gone the length of wearing a beard he might possibly not have been open to an actual libel, as on a fama clamosa of scandal, but he would most certainly have been dealt with in a drastic manner. Indeed, in those days, anyone who wore a beard upon his chin was a person to be stared at, and it would, I verily believe, have been a subject for discussion as to whether he was not a lunatic, unless his nose tended to exonerate him as being a rabbi. We used to look with wondering eyes at two "Joanna Southcott's men," named after a woman who was believed by her followers to be the chosen bringerin of the second advent, after the manner of the first. These two were a remnant of those who shared this belief, although she had died some years before I ever saw them. It was part of their cult not to mar the beard; they were the only two persons who in my boyhood allowed their chin to be covered according to nature. All others, even if for health reasons they required a natural covering to the throat, yet scrupulously removed every hair on lip and chin. It may give an idea of how rigidly special manners were held to be essential to respectability, to recount what happened when Lord Justice-Clerk Hope was presiding in the Court of Justiciary. A solicitor before the Supreme Courts, who was called as a witness,