INCLEMENT WEATHER FURS AND OVERCOATS.

Even a philosopher, according to the Latin verse, is downhearted when he has a cold. The glory of the great day was departed. Sodden ground and murky skies and a raw wind are no setting for a parade of frocks. You want clothes, not for ornament, but for use. The charms of picnic festivities are not, on such a day, seductive. To eat frivolous food under canvas, while your outraged body cries for something warm and solid in a wind-proof house is soothing to no man and but few women. It is much to our credit that our English stoicism enabled us to carry on without any visible signs of emotion, but the azure tint that stole over fair cheeks and masculine noses. There was much blue blood at Ascot yesterday.

As a spectacle it was a show of furs and overcoats. There was an assembly ready for anything, whether arctic or diluvial. Ermine and sable and seal, and all the other pelts with the strange names, had superseded the regulation filmy stuff. It did not make for colourful splendour.

The capacity of the human frame to endure cold exhibits amazing variations. When people only use fur in strips or bands they feel that they value it most in very different parts of their forms. To wear it round the shoulders seems to a man grateful and comforting, but in the mysteries of the feminine organism it is found that some prefer to do without it up above, and use it only lower down, where its function would seem to be only decorative, yet certainly is not. But it was futile to speculate on a day when only by action, and continual action, was life made tolerable.