"My colleagues do not wear them!" said Audry. "You in a peruke!" exclaimed the lady, hardly knowing whether to laugh or cry at the idea of her lover in a wig. "It is the symbol and livery of science. Without it, it appears, I cannot be a doctor." The lady insisted, by way of compromise, that she should be permitted to select the wig; and she expressly made choice of one of such colossal dimensions and of so easy a fit, that poor Audry looked more like a fool than a physician in it. But it helped to bring him into fashion. He was considered as an old gentleman; and young ladies admitted him to their circles and causeries, from which they affected to banish youth of aspect less mature. His popularity was on the increase, just as an adventure happened to him, which might have shaken a reputation more firmly established. He was one evening summoned to attend a wealthy English Peer, whose mansion was in the Rue Tournon. His way thither led him beneath the window of his fair friend, who had been rather piqued by his success among the ladies, and who had previously resolved to overthrow both cause and effect connected therewith. She was a pretty, sparkling, and joyously mischievous girl of some three-and-twenty years; and her father loved her nearly as much as he did fishing, which, for an enthusiastic angler as he was, was no small proof of paternal affection. The damsel contrived so well, that as the doctor passed, she flung her line, with the paternal fishhook at the end of it, and caught up the wig therewith as lightly as her father would have picked up a trout. Dr. Audry looked up in astonishment, and prayed for his professional peruke in vain. Being hurried, moreover, he passed on his way, and repaired to his patient with a head like Mr. Buckstone's in Scrub. When Lord A-beheld him he exclaimed, "What! waited upon by the assistant, when I sent for the principal ?—by a student, when I needed a practitioner?—but perhaps you are Doctor Audry's nephew:-well, my groom has the same sort of rheumatism that I have; be kind enough to go and look after him.” 66 Audry, in his memoirs, in telling the tale, does not forget the sequel. Thus insulted, he rushed, in a rage, to the offending lady, who met him with open arms and laughing eyes. 'My dear doctor," said she, "do not storm; Papa was just on the point of securing to you something better than a peruke, a fortune!" "You are a light—” "Think to be loved, as you love me: I know it," said the lady archly, "but St. Severin is our parish nevertheless.” "St. Severin our parish? I do not comprehend; unless I am authorized to go there and arrange for our marriage." "Take all that papa prescribes upon that head; and, talking of heads, you shall have your peruke again after the honeymoon." Audry was content; and the wedding went off as merrily as though it had been the last act in an old comedy; though the newly-espoused couple did not lead quite so angelical a life afterwards, as either St. Severin of Cologne, or his namesake of Bordeaux. But it was neither to be expected nor required of them. They would not have been half as profitable to the state if they had followed, throughout, the example set them by the saint whose name graced the church wherein they were united. A Dacota doctor is perhaps, neither in costume nor practice, more absurd than his European brethren of the early part of the last century. His fee is a blanket, a buffalo robe, or a pipe; his dress is chiefly composed of the first two articles; and his cunning lies in his sacred rattle, which he shakes as Christian doctors do their heads, and there is no doubt as much in one as in the other. Wherever he goes he carries with him his medicine-bag; and to ask him what that mysterious article contains, and upon what grounds he applies its contents, would be an insult as profound as you asked your own medical man for the reasons of his practice and expected that he would (or could) give you an answer. The Winnebagoes are attired like their learned brethren among the Dacotas; but dress is not thought so much of by them as possession of the medicine-bag: to lose this is to lose reputation. But savages as these are, they have some very wise observances. The if chief of these is the medicine-dance. This is a grand solemnity given by the doctors, for two reasons: one, for the increase of practice, just as we find the fashion to be at home; the other reason is, in order to appease the dead who have died under medical treatment. And perhaps that is also the reason why our own medicine-men give such neat dinners, such splendid balls, or such enjoyable quadrilles on the carpet and soirées dansantes. These entertainments are born of remorse; and when next you join the saltatory throng at the house of your medical friend, ponder gravely, good reader, on the solemnity of the occasion, and impress upon that fair girl, with her hair à l'Impératrice, that the object for which you mutually point the light fantastic toe, is to rescue the medical master of the house from the revengeful visits of the unskilfully slain at his hands. That understood, plunge with frantic velocity into the valse à deux temps. The sacred rattles of the Dacotas and Winnebagoes are always shaken with maddening rapidity on these occasions, and you are the rattles by which doctors live. The more you are shaken, the better they live; and should you have the honour of perishing by their prescription, find comfort in knowing that other waltzers will perform, not in your memory, but that you may be peacefully forgotten, the "medicine-dance" of the medically murdered. It will be found only another division of this subject to treat of odd dressers and dresses, after touching upon doctors and costume, -doctors who so often looked like the Laird of Cockpen, of whom we are told that "His wig was well powther'd and as good as new, Ah, who could refuse the Laird wi' a' that?" If the doctors were sometimes queerly costumed, their matches might be occasionally found among the laity. For these I open the last scene, and "Enter mob variously attired." ODD FASHIONS. "Avec ceci finit la comédie; allez-vous-en, gens de la noce, et dites du bien de l'auteur." -Crispian à la Foire. THE fashion of tattooing has a singular origin. We are indebted for our knowledge thereof to Clearchus, who tells us that the women of Scythia, having seized upon some Thracian women who dwelt in their vicinity, traced on their bodies, by means of needles, certain marks, which the latter could not contemplate without being made very angry. The lady who went down Regent-street the other day with the shop-ticket affixed to her new shawl, and which contained the announcement, "Very chaste, £1. 58.," was not half so ridiculous as these poor Thracian ladies, with the etchings about them drawn by their dear Scythian cousins. It does not seem ever to have entered the heads of the victims that they might have concealed their annoyance beneath a garment. They did not wear garments at that time. They however hit upon a device not unworthy of that page of the Duke de Vendôme who, losing his shoulder-knot of ribbons, on being pursued as he was leaving the boudoir of a maid of honour, hurried to the room where his fellow-pages were sleeping and cut the knots off from every laced coat in the apartment, and so escaped detection. The Thracian women fixed upon as happy an expedient. They so mixed the tattooed marks with other designs, that the original drawings were entirely lost in the embellishments, like Handel's airs in a certain lady's cadences. By this means the characteristic sign of their shame and ignominy was no longer discernible, and the mode of tattooing became a mode indeed in up . Thrace. A young lady there could not have had a greater compliment paid to her at a ball than to be told that, front and back, her tattooing was in the true style of the Thracian improvement on the Scythian design. The dear creature might blush, but she would feel happily sure that she had made a conquest, and would make all her young friends savage by telling them the secret. Among the odd dressers of the last century was the celebrated French philosopher and poet, Monsieur de la Condamine. Like George Selwyn, he was an indefatigable attendant at executions. He of course did not forget that of Damiens, the most horrible butchery ever enacted on the Grève, and at which French ladies were present with opera glasses, the better to enjoy the spectacle. Even so wits, philosophers, and "females " honoured the Mannings with their presence, in front of Horsemonger-lane gaol. Condamine went for ever in search of truth, like Diogenes looking for a man. At the execution of Damiens, he pushed his way close to the dread officers of the law, and there, with his trumpet fastened to his ear (for he was "as deaf as a post"), and his pencil and tablets in his hands, he watched and recorded progress. At each tearing of the flesh by the pincers, or at each blow dealt by the bar which crushed the limbs on which it fell, Condamine exclaimed, “What does he say now? what does he say now?" The satellites of Charlot, the hangman, wished to drive him away as a troublesome fellow, but the executioner civilly remarked that "the gentleman was an amateur, and might stay if he liked." With all this, De la Condamine was a simple-minded and humane man. In our London streets he produced a great effect; there he walked, dressed as laxily as Sir Simon Slack, and carrying with him a huge umbrella, almost as huge as an ear-trumpet, a telescope, a compass, and a map of London permanently unfolded. He questioned everybody he met, but as he did this in English, as he thought, of which he did not comprehend a word, he was exceedingly like a metaphysician, who necessarily does not understand either what he says or what is said to him. His singular |