In Boston we had three hours to spare; so we sent our luggage,—­that is, my trunk—­to the Worcester Depot, and walked leisurely ourselves.  I had a little shopping to do, to complete my outfit for the journey,—­a very little shopping,—­only a nightcap or two.  Ordinarily such a thing is a matter of small moment, but in my case the subject had swollen into unnatural dimensions.  Nightcaps are not generally considered healthy,—­at least not by physicians.  Nature has given to the head its sufficient and appropriate covering, the hair.  Anything more than this injures the head, by confining the heat, preventing the soothing, cooling contact of air, and so deranging the circulation of the blood.  Therefore I have always heeded the dictates of Nature, which I have supposed to be to brush out the hair thoroughly at night and let it fly.  But there are serious disadvantages connected with this course.  For Nature will be sure to whisk the hair away from your ears where you want it, and into your eyes where you don’t want it, besides crowning you with magnificent disorder in the morning.  But as I have always believed that no evil exists without its remedy, I had long been exercising my inventive genius in attempts to produce a head-gear which should at once protect the ears, confine the hair, and let the skull alone.  I regret to say that my experiments were an utter failure, notwithstanding the amount of science and skill brought to bear upon them.  One idea lay at the basis of all my endeavors.  Every combination, however elaborate or intricate, resolved into its simplest elements, consisted of a pair of rosettes laterally to keep the ears warm, a bag posteriorly to put the hair into, and some kind of a string somewhere to hold the machine together.  Every possible shape into which lace or muslin or sheeting could be cut or plaited or sewed or twisted, into which crewel or cord could be crocheted or netted or tatted, I make bold to declare was essayed, until things came to such a pass that every odd bit of dry goods lying around the house was, in the absence of any positive testimony on the subject, assumed to be one of my nightcaps,—­an utterly baseless assumption, because my achievements never went so far as concrete capuality, but stopped short in the later stages of abstract idealism.  However, prejudice is stronger than truth; and, as I said, every fragment of every fabric that could not give an account of itself was charged with being a nightcap till it was proved to be a dishcloth or a cart-rope.  I at length surrendered at discretion, and remembered that somewhere in my reading I had met with exquisite lace caps, and I did not know but that from the combined fineness and strength of their material they might answer the purpose, even if in form they should not be everything that was desirable,—­and I determined to ascertain, if possible, whether such things existed anywhere out of poetry.