July 18.
Tne spectacle of mere man rebelling against his evening dress garments, egged on thereto by courageous woman, is a joyous one. When his collar has wilted and various signs of undue moisture appear across the back of his coat, man is not altogether a thing of beauty, and with the hot weather upon us, there is little wonder that our correspondence columns contain protest against the decrees of fashion. From the moment be rebelled against Nature man has always been trying to assert what he firmly believes to be his rights against what he equally believes to be some form of tyranny, but as this tyranny is generally of his own or woman's devising, and moral courage is a much rarer attribute than physical, his as It more often than not loses its impetus before he comes to close grips. The trouble is that his comrades will not join him. However they feel about such matters they lack the honesty of a George the Second to admit openly their dislike for poetry and -pictures. Nor do they have the robust courage of the American Governor who de-claved that if grand opera were attempted in his State he would suspend the law of Habeas Corpus and call out the militia to suppress it. Equally they lack the nerve of the libertines of Geneva who, as Froude tells us, memorialized their government with a demand that they should be allowed to live as they chose without reference to the preachers."" So it is that from time to time protest is heard, yet almost invariably to relapse into sullen silene; immediately thereafter.
For -the information of those who would have us reform our evening dress, we may call to their notice the calico dances of Kowloon. "Hongkong, cer-Yainly in the environs of the Peak, does not strike one as the kind of place where a movement to sweep aside all that convention and tradition have ever dictated the way of dress would be likely to succeed, but in its much more democratic suburb of Kowloon a party of brave spirits seem to have defied everything and everybody and under the subtle. title of ''calico'' now dance to their hearts' content 2
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.