them with glass sugar-plums and showers of
coloured comfits; they cannot even (letting
alone these epidemics) change for sensible and
prudential reasons; Nature's livery is unalterable.
She allows but one suit, and that lasts
all through life. The duck has a green plush
neck, the cock has a scarlet crown. They must
keep to green and red; there is no alternative,
let it suit their complexion or not. Perkins
may discover a new pleasure in his purple, it is
not for them; they have got their suit, and must
make the best of it; it will last them till they
are laid in state, the one in a bed of green
peas, the other delicately tinted with egg-
sauce. Nature is chary of her ideas; she cut the
daisy out of white and yellow, and just touched
it with pink, thousands of years ago, and there
the daisy is still, just the same—conservative
enough. And here a moral: The animal and
plants are Tory. Man is progressive. Heaven
knows, man is animal enough, in his greediness,
in his vanity, in his rage, in his fear, in his
magpie collecting, in his sheepish running in
flocks, in his stupid curiosity, in his respect
for the strongest, but in two things we are not
animal:

                    WE COOK AND WE DRESS.

There are no animal Soyers, no animal
Madame Furbelowas, there is no Perkins to stain
monkeys a fashionable purple, or to dye a lion's
mane Mauve. Sandy they are, tawny he is, and
sandy and tawny the last monkey and the latest
lion will be found. Warlike monkeys have been
found that did battle with cocoa-nuts and stones
and boughs against intruding travellers who would
have disturbed the balance of power in monkey
land, and destroyed the monkey constitution;
but they had never ruddled themselves red with
ochre, nor covered their breasts with sham lace,
nor stained their legs cherry colour. Yet, when the
first Roman pushed the Kentish oak-boughs
back with his spear, he found Paradoxacus
painting his body with a map of England in blue
woad. The earliest Irish, who two thousand
years ago brained their landlords and, even
at that early period, made bulls, stained their
shirts yellow with saffron. We may, therefore,
fairly suppose that the first milliner was
probably contemporaneous with the first
woman, and that the carpenters who made the
ark were not ignorant of the construction of a
bandbox.

A great many legends relating to animals turn
upon their supposed melancholy and despairing
regret at having no future state; but how much
more likely that the tearfulness in the brown eye
of the horse, and the contemplative pitifulness in
that of a cow, arise from envious longing for
a change of dress. Perhaps every time Madge
in the red petticoat milks Chocolate Moll, and
every time a wonderful creature in "peg tops"
or Zouave breeches gets into a cab, the animals
feel cruelly the helplessness of their condition.
No wonder that sometimes the cow runs horns
down at Madge, and that the cab horse browses
a mouthful of artificial flowers out of an old
maid's bonnet. It is all envy—sheer animal
envy. No wonder, then, the Swiss cows delight
in the necklace and bell that guides the herd to
the terraces of sweet thyme and myrtle-leafed
Alp roses. No wonder the Spanish mules
rejoice in their trappings of red and yellow. How
the London brew-horses exult in their jingling
brass ornaments and their ear-bags! With how
much better grace, then, would a cow submit to
be milked if it had a hanging of cherry-coloured
silk, a cab horse to gallop if it had trappings
of blue and silver, brewer's horses to tug
and strain if they were covered with yellow
and red nettings! Brute animals have their
vanity to comfort them for not being human,
and men have their vanity because they are not
Brute animals.

Truly, man cooks and woman dresses. There
we win the race. We beat them, too, by
changing and advancing; for, while we made
the reed hut grow till it became a Gothic cathedral,
the dove still builds her nest as when she
flew, first of all the birds, to land from Noah's
ark, leaving its fellow to follow as it might.
It is in this point of change that the peacock
of the terrace is beaten by the lady of the
manor-house. The vain bird comes to the hall
window, pecks to show the performance is going
to begin, and then, with a fluff, spreads abroad
its great Indian fan, full of golden glitters,
brazen gleams, and emerald eyes, to show her
human rival in the Perkins's purple barege, how
poor a thing human dress is beside Divine invention.
The lady says nothing; but, the next time
the bird looks in, Eve is in rose satin, and the
third time in Mauve colour and black. Why, it
would take a kaleidoscope to match her. The
peacock trails back to the farm-yard to tell his
friend the bacon pig and his noisy kinsmen the
barn door fowls, the completeness of her defeat.
The lady changes like a dolphin; she has more
aspects and mutations than the fickle moon
herself. "Bah! it is not fair," says the pea-hen.
"No, no," chatter the pea-chicks, unanimous for
once.

I dare say my readers all know the story of
the Red Indian who, having wounded an English
officer during the American war, was so puzzled
when he went to scalp him at finding his enemy's
wig come off in his hand that he relinquished
his purpose. I am not sure that the wounded
man did not become a sort of Manitou or
Indian deity in consequence, and depart at
last laden with buffalo tongues, blankets, and
wampum belts.

To return to Mr. Perkins and his wonderful
purple, let us hope that it will not be
forsaken as easily as it has been discovered. It
has a moral superiority over other purples—it is
permanent. The French purple grew white in
sea air, or in sunlight, or on the smallest
provocation. In waistcoats, it stained your shirts; in
gloves, it gave you dyer's hands. Now the
Proteus is changed; it is fixed; it stains still, but
it never fades. It may be a silly thing to forfeit
all individuality and to put on a flock colour that
becomes a livery—a colour that, on the smallest