Yet, in sober earnest, the first useful thing that ever this naked fellow set his hand to was the making of his own apron. The world, as we know and love it, began--your pardon, Mr. Kipling, but I cannot help it--when
Cross-legged our Father Adam sat and fastened them one by one, Till, leaf by leaf, with loving care he got his apron done; The first new suit the world had seen, and mightily pleased with it, Till the Devil chuckled behind the Tree, 'It's pretty, but will it fit?'
From that historic moment everything a man does has been preceded by dressing, and almost immediately the process lost its convenient simplicity. Not since Adam's apron has any complete garment, or practical suit of clothes, been devised--except for sea-bathing--that a busy man could slip on in the morning and off again at night. All our indignation to the contrary, we prefer the complicated and difficult: we enjoy our buttons; we are withheld only by our queer sex-pride from wearing garments that button up in the back--indeed, on what we frankly call our 'best clothes,' we _have the buttons_ though we _dare not button_ with them. The one costume that a man could slip on at night and off again in the morning has never, if he could help it, been worn in general society, and is now outmoded by a pretty little coat and pantaloons of soft material and becoming color. We come undressed; but behold! thousands of years before we were born, it was decided that we must be dressed as soon as possible afterward, and clothes were made for us while it was yet in doubt whether we would be a little gentleman or a little lady. And so a man's first clothes are cunningly fashioned to do for either; worse still,--a crying indignity that, oh, thank Heaven, he cannot remember in maturity,--he is forcibly valeted by a woman, very likely young and attractive, to whom he has never been formally introduced.
But with this nameless, speechless, and almost invertebrate thing that he once was--this little kicking Maeterlinck (if I may so call it) between the known and the unknown worlds--the mature self-dresser will hardly concern himself. Rather, it may be, will he contemplate the amazing revolution which, in hardly more than a quarter-century, has reversed public opinion, and created a free nation which, no longer regarding a best-dresser with fine democratic contempt, now seeks, with fine democratic unanimity, to be a best-dresser itself. Or perhaps, smiling, he will recall Dr. Jaeger, that brave and lonely spirit who sought to persuade us that no other garment is so comfortable, so hygienic, so convenient, and so becoming to all figures, as the union suit--and that it should be worn externally, with certain modifications to avoid arrest. His photograph, thus attired, is stamped on memory: a sensible, bearded gentleman, inclining to stoutness, comfortably dressed in eye-glasses and a modified union suit. And then, almost at the same moment, the Clothing Industry, perhaps inspired by the doctor's courage and informed by his failure, started the revolution, since crowned by critical opinion, in a Sunday newspaper, that 'The American man, considering him in all the classes that constitute American society, is to-day the best-dressed, best-kept man in the world.'