Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/184

164 or gracefully retiring from society, had but a limited range compared with our ladies for the choice of cosmetics; but they turned to account such as were within reach, — bears' grease and vermilion. They were content with the hair that grew on their own heads, and they wholly dispensed with corsets and paddings. Their parade in strange feathers and skins with hanging tails, their boring of the nose sometimes, as well as generally the ears, for rings, and their magniloquent titles and stately forms appear grotesque to us. But how very much in such matters depends upon association and use! Do not the curious garb and ever-changing and sometimes unattractive and uncomfortable fashions and ornaments of women, in the most refined circles of life, furnish matter of fun and raillery — not always in secret — for the other sex? In this country, in all our public ceremonials, inaugurations, etc., we have found it possible to dispense with crowns, sceptres, maces, and other insignia, with judges' wigs and all liveries. But foreign courts and shows and forms retain them all as essential or expedient; they go with the griffins and vampires and phœnixes of the Old World still. Foreigners in attendance among us on great state occasions, like the inauguration of a President of the nation, are often disagreeably impressed with the entire disuse of the costumes and emblems familiar to them at home. Our Indians also did the best they could, with their orders of the collar, the fleece, and the garter. The slashed doublets of cavaliers, the hooped or trailed skirt of the lady and her face patched with court-plaster, the ermine of the judge, the curled wig of the barrister, the rod of the tipstaff and the beadle, the sword of state and the black or white wand of the master of ceremonies, the woolsack and seal-wallet of the chancellor and the staff of the drum-major, — all manifest the richer and more abundant material for farce and ceremonial of the white man, not a more elevated and ennobled nature.