custom, for boys of our hero's age. Many woes were attendant upon the
discovery that these half-suspected sumptuary laws were certain facts.

No present-day country boy and girl, coming from the average home to the
house of city cousins, would need to feel any such qualms. Should they,
five minutes' inspection of the garments of those city cousins would
relieve their latent questionings. They would see that, to the casual
eye, they and their cousins were dressed in the same type of raiment.

How could they fail to be? A large crop of "fashion magazines"
flourishes in America. The rural free delivery brings them to the very
doors of the farmhouse. By the use of mail orders the mother on the farm
can obtain whatever materials the particular "fashion magazine" to which
she is a subscriber advises, together with paper patterns from which she
can cut anything, from "jumpers" to a "coat for gala occasions."

The approved clothes of all American children in our time are so
exceedingly simple in design that any woman who can sew at all can
construct them; and, in the main, the materials of which they are made
are so inexpensive that even the farmer whose income is moderate in size
can afford to supply them. A clergyman who had worked both in city and
in country parishes once told me that he attributed the marked increase
in ease and grace of manner--and, consequently, in "sociability"--among
country people to-day, as compared with country people of his boyhood,
very largely to the invention of paper patterns.

"Rural folk dressed in a way peculiar to themselves then," he said; "now
they dress like the rest of the world. It is curious," he went on,
reflectively, "but human beings, as a whole, seem unable not to be
awkward in their behavior if their costumes can possibly be