Chapter VII: Dress and Personal Habits

Never forget to wash yourself and brush your hair (if you have any) before quitting your room in the morning. To make your toilet at the kitchen sink, or even at a convenient fire-plug, is to set the canons of good society at naught.

Never re-appear in the morning with a dirty shirt, a crushed hat, and with your necktie under your ear. This might convey the impression that you had gone to bed in your clothes.

Never be filthy in anything. Cleanliness is a virtue that even a recognized gentleman cannot afford to hold in contempt.

Never appear in other than subdued colors, for the most part. “Give me plain red and yellow,” said the negro minister, in his advice to his flock on the vanities of dress.

Never wear anything over-dainty. Never--of course, we are now addressing the male reader, for whom this invaluable Hand Book is chiefly designed--wear anything that the gentler sex have made exclusively their own. To appear in public with a nosegay in lieu of a throat-stud, or even with a sunflower at the waist, would be likely to excite remark.

Never wear check-shirts, children’s dickies, nor ’longshoremen’s jumpers. An immaculate shirt-front with a clean collar to match, is always _en règle_.

Never wear full evening dress in the early morning, especially if you intend working in the garden, or whitewashing the back fence, before going down town.

Never wear dancing pumps in rainy or snowy weather, or arctics if it is warm and fine. But long-continued observation will finally enable you to discriminate for yourself in these minor matters.

Never appear among ladies with your boots covered with mud, and your whole person suggestive of having been rolled in the gutter. If you haven’t a servant or wife to clean you up, undertake the task yourself, however distasteful.

Never wear your hat tilted far over your nose, with a cigar meeting its brim at a rising angle of forty-five degrees from your lips. The Volunteer Fire Department, though once the arbiter of manly deportment, is a thing of the past.

Never wear pinchbeck jewelry, loud breast-pins, nor steel, silver or washed-gold watch-guards. Secret-society regalia, conspicuously worn, and multitudinous finger-rings are also in questionable taste.

Never walk with a high-and-mighty stud-horse gait, nor yet slouch and slink along as if you had robbed a hen-roost, nor yet with a bounding hoop-la sort of prance, like a clown in the circus-ring. Never, either, walk bow-legged or club-footed, if you can help it. Cultivate a grand, regal, easy and flowing carriage, but without swagger or bombast.

Never walk, especially if in haste, with your arms folded, nor with your hands in your coat-tail pockets.

Never improvise tooth-picks out of fence splints, and then chew them industriously in public. Tobacco and chewing-gum still assert their claims.

Never expectorate all around you at every step you take, without an instant’s intermission. If you are troubled with bronchitis, remain at home. If the same old drunk persistently lingers, try a B. and S., or a gin fizz, according to your judgment.

Never whistle like a locomotive, nor attempt a Tyrolese _jodel_, while walking with a lady or ladies on a fashionable promenade.

Never whittle sticks, play on a jewsharp, or essay to catch flies on window-panes in public. Such recreations, innocent in themselves, should only be pursued in the privacy of one’s own apartment.

Never permit the quality or cut of your wearing-apparel to deteriorate, if you have to live on pork and beans to keep up your end in this regard. “Never retrench in your wardrobe expenses, whatever you do,” said old Samuel Pepys. “All the world knows how you appear, but no one need know how you live.” A frequent change of residence might serve to disconcert the tailors, should they prove troublesome.

Never allow your shoes to run down at the heel, nor out at the toes. Nothing is more incongruous than a fine gentleman, in other respects quite the swell, with his foot-leather burst out around the instep, his stocking heels wabbling up and down at every jump, and his bare toes courting the public gaze.

Never hiccough or sneeze without intermission, unless greatly inebriated. In this dilemma, lose no time in drinking yourself sober, or in seeking temporary retirement, if only on a park-bench.

Never let your lower lip hang down on your breast, like a motherless calf’s. “Put up or shut up,” says the Coptic proverb.

Never, on the other hand, screw up your lips under your nose, as though constantly subjected to an overpowering odor. Even a prevailing ecstatic, attar-of-roses haunted expression is in preferable form to this.

Never fail to keep your nose clean. If you have no handkerchief, use your coat-tail.

Never cultivate a broad, teeth-husking smile, unless your ivories are in good order. Tobacco-stained fangs are at an especial disadvantage in this form.

Never fail to cleanse the teeth at least once a week. A tooth-brush is best.

Never wear your hat in church, in a boudoir, nor at a marriage or burial service; never, on the other hand, take it off when overtaken by a blizzard or a cyclone. If neither the blizzard nor the cyclone does that much for you, you may consider yourself fortunate.

Never doff your hat nor make your bow indiscriminately. A Cyrus Field, for instance, would be justified in expecting greater courtesy than would be accorded to a Jesse James; though, if cornered by one of the latter type on his own stamping-ground, it would doubtless be well not to slight him too conspicuously. Be diplomatic.

Never fail to cultivate an off-hand judgment of men and women who are strangers to you. A man with a head like a monkey’s is not necessarily a savant; nor are putty-like faces, with idiotic lips and China-blue eyes, in women, necessarily Elizabeth Cady Stantonesque in intellectual scope and oratorical brilliancy. You would scarcely mistake Red Leary for Herbert Spencer.

Never carry a lighted cigar into a millinery store or powder-magazine.

Never be over servile to good clothes for themselves alone. The professional thief who lost his life in a double tragedy in Sixth avenue not long ago, was one of the best dressed men in New York.

Never, on the other hand venture to indiscriminately despise slovenly dress in men or women. Lady Burdette-Coutts is said to occasionally slouch around London like a charwoman just for the fun of the thing; good old Steve Girard was wont to dress like a music-master in distress; and some greasy, old, garlic-smelling tatterdemalion at your elbow may be one of the most successful pawnbrokers of the Hebraic persuasion.

Never burst, without notice, into any one’s private apartment like a shot out of a gun. Even your excuse that you want to borrow your car-fare may not be mollifying, and people have nerves.

Never keep gnawing your mustache, twisting your whiskers into fantastic braids, nor making your hat wag about on your head through muscular contraction of the scalp.

Never crackle your knuckles with sharp reports, grit your teeth, heave deep, wheezing sighs, nor keep running your fingers through your hair till it stands up like a brush-heap. If you imagine one or all of these feats to be uniquely interesting, hire out to a dime museum.

Never take any more drinks in the early part of the day than are absolutely necessary to brace you up. Three cocktails as eye-openers, followed by two in the way of appetizers, ought to straighten you up before breakfast, and, if not already a slave to tippling, a dozen beers or so ought to satisfy you between then and noon. If tempted to overdo the matter, recall the wax group of the Drunkard’s Family in Barnum’s old museum, set the teeth hard, and shut down, shut down!

Never forget to say your prayers before going to sleep, if it is in accordance with your religious Convictions.

Never fail to have convictions of some sort. A man without any is like a cat shelling walnuts. Would you be a non-entity, a dolt, a jackass, or a gentleman of distinction, a man of parts, a power in the land?