The mud may cake
up knee-deep, wind and weather work their own sweet will, it is no
one's business to interfere.
When abroad one of my amusements has been of an early morning to
watch Paris making its toilet. The streets are taking a bath,
liveried attendants are blacking the boots of the lamp-posts and
newspaper-KIOSQUES, the shop-fronts are being shaved and having
their hair curled, cafe's and restaurants are putting on clean
shirts and tying their cravats smartly before their many mirrors.
By the time the world is up and about, the whole city, smiling
freshly from its matutinal tub, is ready to greet it gayly.
It is this attention to detail that gives to Continental cities
their air of cheerfulness and thrift, and the utter lack of it that
impresses foreigners so painfully on arriving at our shores.
It has been the fashion to laugh at the dude and his high collar,
at the darky in his master's cast-off clothes, aping style and
fashion. Better the dude, better the colored dandy, better even
the Bowery "tough" with his affected carriage, for they at least
are reaching blindly out after something better than their
surroundings, striving after an ideal, and are in just so much the
superiors of the foolish souls who mock them - better, even
misguided efforts, than the ignoble stagnant quagmire of slouch
into which we seem to be slowly descending.
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