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Updated: June 26, 2025
We put on white ties and tail-coats every night for dinner in the open shamyanah, where the Maharajah provided us with an excellent European repast served on solid silver plates. As the endless resources of this wonderful camp included an ice-making machine, he also gave us iced champagne every evening.
The American infantry of that period wore a uniform consisting of "blue, brass-buttoned tail-coats, skin-tight pantaloons, and 'stove-pipe hats, with red, white and blue cockades." One pictures them marching in the brown October woods, their bayonets gleaming in the sunshine, and their bugles awakening strange echoes from headland and bluff.
March 30. Appalling morning of wind and dust; I bicycled in agitation of spirit to Domine quo Vadis. A wretched little church, no kind of beauty about it, full of decayed, greasy pictures, and, far better than they, penny coloured prints of the Saviour and Infant Baptist, and of the Life and Death of the Religious and the Irreligious Person about 1850, both in high hats and tail-coats.
The trees grow so beautifully about these mounds, and upon the mounds, that it is easy to fill the interspaces with figures from Gainsborough's pictures, ladies in hoops and powdered hair, elegant gentlemen wearing buckled shoes, tail-coats, and the swords which made them gentlemen.
Of course the jackets for the fellows under the Upper 'Shell' are all right, but one cannot go on wearing jackets higher than that; still, I do think they might let us wear cutaways; tail-coats were all right when every one else wore tail-coats, but in our days it is absurd to wear a coat which nobody else wears except for an evening dress.
Capotes were there loose, flowing, and picturesque; and broad-cloth tail-coats were there, of the last century, tight-fitting, angular in a word, detestable; verifying the truth of the proverb that extremes meet, by showing that the cut which all the wisdom of tailors and scientific fops, after centuries of study, had laboriously wrought out and foisted upon the poor civilised world as perfectly sublime, appeared in the eyes of backwoodsmen and Indians utterly ridiculous.
According to their different social positions, they wore tail-coats, overcoats, shooting-jackets, cutaway-coats: fine tail-coats, redolent of family respectability, that came out of the wardrobe only on state occasions; overcoats with long tails flapping in the wind and round capes and pockets like sacks; shooting-jackets of coarse cloth, usually worn with a cap with a brass-bound peak; very short cutaway-coats with two small buttons in the back, close together like a pair of eyes, the tails of which seemed cut out of one piece by a carpenter's hatchet.
Bad people swagger in tail-coats and chimney-pots, a few with knee-breeches, but the large majority in trousers, and for all the world like guests at a garden-party. Worldly-Wiseman alone, by some inexplicable quirk, stands before Christian in laced hat, embroidered waistcoat, and trunk-hose.
They were all seated at the supper-table, which was now decorated with flowers, with baskets of fruit, with plates of bonbons, and with favors in the form of dolls tricked out like little ladies of the Renaissance. The servants wore tail-coats and white-cotton gloves. Leonello and Leonardo, Lina and Laura, even Antonio, had on the evening-dress appropriate to the twentieth century.
And so he dies in his unbelief. It seemed odd to hear this conversation from the Wilderness recited, word for word, in the American vernacular, and with a local colouring that suggested that both the sceptic and the young convert wore tail-coats, and that the mother had "come along" in a stuff dress.
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