it.  I happened to be looking at him, and I believe I stopped breathing as I sat and stared.  Under his coat he had on a little skirt of green plaid about big enough for my Corinne when she was about five years old, and then he didn’t wear anything whatever until you got down to his long stockings and low shoes.  I was so struck with the feeling that he was an absent-minded person that I punched Jone and whispered to him to go quick and tell him.  Jone looked at him and laughed, and said that was the Highland costume.

Now if that man had had his martial plaid wrapped around him, and had worn a Scottish cap with a feather in it and a long ribbon hanging down his back, with his claymore girded to his side, I wouldn’t have been surprised; for this is Scotland, and that would have been like the pictures I have seen of Highlanders.  But to see a man with the upper half of him dressed like a clerk in a dry goods store and the lower half like a Highland chief, was enough to make a stranger gasp.

[Illustration:  “Jone looked at him and said that was the Highland costume.”]

But since then I have seen a good many young men dressed that way.  I believe it is considered the tip of the fashion.  I haven’t seen any of the bare-legged dandies yet with a high silk hat and an umbrella, but I expect it won’t be long before I meet one.  We often see the Highland soldiers that belong to the garrison at the castle, and they look mighty fine with their plaid shawls and their scarfs and their feathers; but to see a man who looks as if one half of him belonged to London Bridge and the other half to the Highland moors, does look to me like a pretty bad mixture.

I am not so sure, either, that the whole Highland dress isn’t better suited to Egypt, where it doesn’t often rain, than to Scotland.  Last Saturday we was at St. Giles’s Church, and the man who took us around told us we ought to come early next morning and see the military service, which was something very fine; and as Jone gave him a shilling he said he would be on hand and watch for us, and give us a good place where we could see the soldiers come in.  On Sunday morning it rained hard, but we was both at the church before eight o’clock, and so was a good many other people, but the doors was shut and they wouldn’t let us in.  They told us it was such a bad morning that the soldiers could not come out, and so there would be no military service that day.  I don’t know whether those fine fellows thought that the colors would run out of their beautiful plaids, or whether they would get rheumatism in their knees; but it did seem to me pretty hard that soldiers could not come out in the weather that lots of common citizens didn’t seem to mind at all.  I was a good deal put out, for I hate to get up early for nothing, but there was no use saying anything, and all we could do was to go home, as all the other people with full suits of clothes did.