As you perceive, therefore, my Boston shopping was not every-day trading.  It was to mark the abandonment of an old and the inauguration of a new line of policy.  Thus it was with no ordinary interest that I looked carefully at all the shops, and when I found one that seemed to hold out a possibility of nightcaps, I went in.  Halicarnassus obeyed the hint which I pricked into him with the point of my parasol, and stopped outside.  The one place in the world where a man has no business to be is the inside of a dry-goods shop.  He never looks and never is so big and bungling as there.  A woman skips from silk to muslin, from muslin to ribbons, from ribbons to table-cloths with the grace and agility of a bird.  She glides in and out among crowds of her sex, steers sweepingly clear of all obstacles, and emerges triumphant.  A man enters and immediately becomes all boots and elbows.  He needs as much room to turn round in as the English iron-clad Warrior, and it takes him about as long.  He treads on all the flounces, runs against all the clerks, knocks over all the children, and is generally under-foot.  If he gets an idea into his head, a Nims’s battery cannot dislodge it.  You thought of buying a shawl; but a thousand considerations in the shape of raglans, cloaks, talmas, pea-jackets, induce you to modify your views.  He stands by you.  He hears all your inquiries and all the clerk’s suggestions.  The whole process of your reasoning is visible to his naked eye.  He sees the sack, or visite, or cape put upon your shoulders and you walking off in it, and when you are half-way home, he will mutter, in idiotic amazement, “I thought you were going to buy a shawl!” It is enough to drive one wild.

No!  Halicarnassus is absurd and mulish in many things, but he knows I will not be hampered with him when I am shopping, and he obeys the smallest hint and stops outside.

To be sure, he puts my temper on the rack by standing with his hands in his pockets, or by looking meek, or, likely as not, peering into the shop-door after me with great staring eyes and parted lips; and this is the most provoking of all.  If there is anything vulgar, slipshod, and shiftless, it is a man lounging about with his hands in his pockets.  If you have paws, stow them away; but if you are endowed with hands, learn to carry them properly, or else cut them off.  Nor can I abide a man’s looking as if he were under control.  I want him to be submissive, but I don’t want him to look so.  I want him to do just as he is bidden, but I want him to carry himself like the man and monarch he was made to be.  I want him to stay where he is put, yet not as if he were put there, but as if he had taken his position deliberately.  But, of all things, to have a man act as if he were a clod just emerged for the first time from his own barnyard!  Upon this occasion, however, I was too much absorbed in my errand to note anybody’s demeanor, and I threaded straightway the crowd of customers, went up to the counter, and inquired in a clear voice,—­