Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/122

 —is still a mystery to me. But, indeed, putting them in any clothes at all seems absurd to my mind. Goodness knows, there is enough of dressing and undressing to be gone through in life, without beginning it before we need; and one would think that people who live in bed might, at all events, be spared the torture. Why wake the poor little wretches up in the morning to take one lot of clothes off, fix another lot on, and put them to bed again; and then, at night, haul them out once more, merely to change everything back? And when all is done, what difference is there, I should like to know, between a baby's night-shirt and the thing it wears in the day-time?

Very likely, however, I am only making myself ridiculous—I often do; so I am informed—and I will, therefore, say no more upon this matter of clothes, except only that it would be of great convenience if some fashion were adopted, enabling you to tell a boy from a girl.

At present it is most awkward. Neither hair dress, nor conversation affords the slightest clue, and you are left to guess. By some mysterious law of Nature you invariably guess wrong, and are thereupon regarded by all the relatives and friends as a mixture of fool and knave, the enormity of alluding to a male babe as "she" being only equalled by the atrocity of referring to a female infant as "he." Whichever sex the particular child in question happens not to belong