Put on and worn about the room by two singularly stately and graceful ladies, they fell into lines and folds which recalled the most exquisitely beautiful statuettes of Tanagra; and all allowance made for the glamour lent them by these two "daughters of the gods, divinely tall," it was impossible not to see that no woman could possibly look commonplace and insignificant in such a garment.

Yet Lady de Vesci says that more than once she has known peasant women, to whom such cloaks had been presented, cut off the characteristic and useful hood, and trim the mangled robe with tawdry lace.

So it is all over the world! Women who are models for an artist when they wear some garment indigenous to their country and appropriate to its conditions, prefer to make guys of themselves in grotesque travesties of the latest "styles" from London and Paris and Dublin! Kilkenny boasts that its streets are paved with marble.

It is in fact limestone, but none the worse for that.

The snow did not improve them.
So without going on a pilgrimage to the Kilkenny College, at which Swift, Congreve, and Farquhar,--an odd concatenation of celebrities--were more or less educated, we made our way to the Imperial Hotel for luncheon.