Head-Hunters and Hat-Hunters.

If you had the nerve to pursue her through the wilds of Haberdashery and Lingerie, and touched her on the elbow, she would turn a dull eye upon you, murmur, “Take it away! I don't think it will wash well,” and stagger off into the darkest depths of this mysterious land of Thingamybobs and Faldelals.

No man would willingly watch his wife buy a hat. However hardened he be to human suffering, however tough and wiry his fibre, no man could stand by and see his wife transformed from a wife and mother to a hathunter.

It is said of head-hunters that often they are fond fathers and pleasant providers—apart from their ambition to get ahead. So it is with hat hunters.

When a woman selects a hat she keeps on selecting it until the shopwalker starts to make a shake-down under the counter and the night-watchman tunes into the bed-time stories on the radio.

First she glances at all the headwear displayed to view and sniffs.

“Seventy-five per cont of men's apparel in brought by women.”

page 43 Then she gives a rough idea of what she wants—or doesn't want, as the case may be; something not too large yet not too small, of a colour not too dark and not too light, with a little googley-gog on the side, like a friend of hers bought the season before last. The girl gives her a nasty look—as one woman to another—and proceeds to dig out all the hats under the counter as well as under protest. Your wife sneers audibly and tries on all the ones she knows won't suit her. Then she hops right in and tries them all on again—hats to the right of her, hats to the left of her, hats all over, easily five hundred!

Finally, when the girl is too exhausted even to sneer behind your wife's back, she (your wife) selects the one she sniffed at the hardest. She knows that it doesn't suit her, but she has had her fun and now is willing to pay for it.

“One For His Knob.”

Contrast this with the spectacle of a man purchasing something to cover his soft spot!

He dashes into the hatter's.
“Hat!” he says—and nothing more.

“Hard or soft?” queries the hatter, in the manner of a waiter getting the “low down” on a customer's preference in boiled eggs.

“Soft,” snaps the hatee.

“Yes. Soft should suit your ‘head,” says the hatter. “How's this for size, shape, colour?”

Like a juggler whipping a canary out of a dog's mouth he produces a hat from nowhere.

Three seconds later the hat is bought—paid for—worn.

Of course, the hat buyer gets it in the eye when he arrives home, for the colour and shape are sure to be wrong and the hat either will slip down to his ears or sit on his head like a pigeon on the dome of St. Paul's. But it is bought, and that is the main thing.

Tussles With Tailors.

Strange as it may seem, many a man who casually slams on a lid is a terror

“The hut either will slip down to his ears or sit on his head like a pigean on the dome of St. Paul's”

to his tailor. He may not be one of those men whose pants are a poem, whose neckwear is a tonal tribute to the outfitter's art, whose vests are vestments and whose coats cuddle the form as if they had been poured on hot and smoothed out with a spatula. On the contrary, he probably is one of those large St. Bernard looking men whose suits, five minutes after his tailor has given them a farewell kiss, look as if a tractor had passed over them on a tin roof; his trousers may look like the legs of a loose-skinned elephant, but, nevertheless, he watches the tailor from tape to trousers.

Perhaps it is that the constructive instinct, latent in the male, is aroused; for a suit is rather a structural undertaking than a commercial transaction. Consequently the suitee keeps his eye on the specifications. He is not so concerned as to how the suit is to be built so much as to how it is not to be built. Unless watched, the scriptural words, “You have done those things which you should not have done and you have left undone those things which you should have done,” apply very neatly to tailors. The trouble with tailors is that they study form too closely and, because they have ascertained, by reference to the “Tailor and Cutter,” that the Maharajah of Chutney appeared at Ascot arrayed like the lily——and then some—they are cut to the buckram and their linings are lacerated because you refuse to impersonate the Maharajah of Chutney, or any other saucy scion of the Indes. Women accuse men of undue conservatism in dress, of their failure to change their styles to meet the times; but little do they wot of the battles that rage in tailor's parlours every day; of tailors on their knees imploring their clients, in the name of art and sartorial sublimity, to submit to stream-lined coats, low-pressure pants and vests modelled like the double doors of a strongroom.

Tailors may have their faults, but if men's clothes have not developed through the ages, it is no fault of tailors.

It is the fault of their clients who, year after year, have fought with their backs to the buckram to retain the Englishman's ancient privilege of looking like nothing on earth.

Cave-Man!!