the Temple in Paris, and Rag-fair in London,
is apt to imagine that very little can astonish
him in the cast-off garment line. Let him
come to the Coombe. This, its subsidiaries,
succursals, and tributaries, don't teem but
swarm, don't swarm but burst, with old clothes.
Here is a shop out of a hundred which is a
mass of old clothes, so thickly sown, so deeply
heaped, that the proprietor and proprietors,
squatting among them smoking their pipes,
look like bundles of old clothes (they are
little else) themselves. Every imaginable
article of male and female attire seems
clustered together in this shop. The broken
windows have old clothes stuffed into their
shattered panes; the sleeping department of the
establishment is walled off by a screen of old
gowns and petticoats; the wind is excluded
by old stockings thrust into chinks, and
sleeveless coats laid at the bottoms of doors.
There is a tattered shawl for a carpet, and a
fragment of some under-garment for a table-cloth;
old clothes for counterpanes, old clothes
for window curtains; the pockets of old
clothes (I shouldn't wonder) for corner
cupboards. All the mortals that sleep in the
valley of dry bones seem to have left their
garments here. All Jason's army must have
deposited their civilian's costume or "mufti"
in the Coombe, before they went into
uniform, and took the dragon's-tooth bounty—
stay! another solution: this is what becomes
of our old clothes. How many jackets,
pinafores, petticoats, tunics, skeleton-suits, tail
coats, frock coats, pantaloons, waistcoats, pairs
of boots and shoes, hats, caps, shirts, and
stockings, have we had since we were
children, and where are they now? Has any
man or woman a complete set of his or her
wearing apparel from his or her youth
upwards? If any such, let him or her stand
forth! Some we may have given to our
valets (such of us as possess such retainers);
some we may have bartered, sold, lost, or had
stolen from us. But all cannot have gone
this way. Neither can we wear a garment
(be it ever so threadbare—ever so tattered)
but some vestige, some remnant must remain
(though I once knew an Irish gentleman who
was assured, and convincingly so by his valet,
that he had worn a favourite green hunting-coat
for which he made inquiry—  "clean out").
"What, then, becomes of the old clothes? This:
they take unto themselves wings and fly
away—to the Coombe.

Yes, here they all are, and you may see
yourself retrospectively in a mirror of rags.
Here is the black frock and black sash and
broad-flapped hat with the black plume you
wore for your father's death. You wear these
rags, ay! You wonder now whether you
could ever have worn them, as much as when
at five years old you marvelled why they
were substituted for the glowing plaid merino
and showy Leghorn purchased for you only
three weeks before. Here are your tirst
school-clothes, the marks of the wiped pen
yet on cuff and collar, the whitened elbows
attesting how doggedly you leant with them
on the desk, over verbum personale—  the
wrinkled arms, and frayed cuffs, and cracked
seams, bearing witness how much too big you
grew for that last jacket before you were
provided with a new one. Here is the tail coat
you courted your first wife in; here in dank
sable tatters is the black suit you wore at her
funeral; and here is the blue body coat and
fawn-coloured kerseymeres you made the
second Mrs. Reader a happy woman in. Here
is your schoolmaster's grey duffel dressing-gown,
the very sight of which throws a
shudder through you, even now; your grandmother's
well remembered black satin (worn
only on high days and holidays, and reposing
during the rest of the year in a dilapidated
piebald hair trunk like a quadrangular cow);
your sister's cashmere shawl you brought her
after your first voyage, and in the centre of
which Gyp the puppy bit a neat polygonal
hole. Here are all the boots and shoes you
ever wore—that have paced the deck, or
plodded Cheapside, or tripped along chalked
floors to merry tunes, or crawled through
mud and mire up to high places, or shuffled
about prison-yards, or faltered in docks, or
stumbled in drawing-rooms, or kept the "pot
a boiling," or stood on the damp ground over
the dampest clay beside the dampest grave,
while you peered down to see the last of
kindred or of love. Oh man, man, go to the
Coombe and learn! Strive not to read futurity,
but con over that past which is surely
spread out before you there in ragged leaves.
Did the Teufelsdröck of Carlyle's Sartor
Resartus ever come to the Coombe? If he
live yet—and when will he die!—let him
come.

Seriously, (if among bizarre and fantastic
speculations a man can claim credit for
seriousness) there is really and truly a
cause for this extraordinary accumulation of
old clothes not only in the Coombe, but in
every back street of Dublin. The Irish, from
the peasantry even to the numerous class of
petty shopkeepers and mechanics are, it is
patent, almost universal wearers of old clothes.
At what season of national depression, what
climax of suffering and destitution they were
first reduced to this degrading strait is yet to
be discovered; but to this day, and in this
day thousands of persons (whose equals in
England would disdain it) are content to
wear second-hand garments—not only outer
but inner and under. Again, the extraordinary
exodus, which every year takes tens of
thousands of Irishmen from their native
shores (principally to America) creates an
enormous demand for second-hand wearing
apparel; for in the United States clothes are
among the very dearest articles of supply and
a newly arrived emigrant without money or
without some wardrobe, however tattered,
would soon have to go as Adam did. And
again, many many hundreds of poor creatures