Mittens
By BERNARD DARWIN rintis is not an article about golf, but I should like to . say one thing in defence of golfers. In many respects they may be very foolish people, but in one respect they are, particularly in winter time, wiser than all the rest of the world. They wear mittens.
They have only come to it gradually ; they have fought against the light as long as they could, but they have succumbed at last. There was a time when my friends used to laugh at me for wearing mittens. When they saw mine—of delicious grey fluffy AN.'ool—they would ask me facetiously if I was "like that all over." Even to-day they do not wear them as often as they might or, like the three little kittens, they lose them, but they no longer stare or scoff, and I find myself, a humble and unnoticed member of the mittened herd. They have become wiser, and the mitten itself has become better than it used to be. The original one, as worn by old ladies in pictures, was a clumsy thing, for it cumbered the palm of the hand. So the early pioneers had only wristlets, which were, to be sure, much better than nothing. Then some anonymous benefactor in- vented the perfect mitten, or, to give it a more technical name, muffetee. It covers the back of the hand with a woolly shield which is looped round the fingers, but it leaves the palm bare. Now there is no excuse for the man who " blows his nails" and complains that he cannot feel the club. - In face of such a discovery the rest of the world remains actually as well as metaphorically cold, and this serves it right. There are innumerable situations in life which the mitten would render more bearable. Think of the poor writer toiling still as a mouse. in his garret with fingers growing ever more numb. After writing the first two sentences of this article fetched my mittens and am in..a pleasant glow. I have before now combined the chivalrous parts of Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh, taken off my mittens and spread them before a young lady who could scarcely wield the typewriter for cold, with the most gratifying results. Mittens are as good as a great-coat on a frosty day, and they can be taken off and carried ; whereas a coat over the arm is not only a nuisance but takes away half the zest and romance of a winter walk. These are truths which anyone can find out for himself ; yet the sight of a citizen pur- suing his everyday avocation in mittens is still exceedingly rare. Why this should be is only one branch of the wider question why so many people are too proud to be warm There is in nearly all of us an instinctive feeling that it is disgraceful to put on enough clothes. Was there eve' a small boy who did not rebel against wearing a great- coat ? I can still remember a certain winter Sunday':, walk of early youth which was poisoned by the sight ol another boy, not perceptibly older, who had no great- coat. He was rendered the more odiously enviable by the fact that he wore an Eton jacket, and to have one was then an unsatisfied ambition comparable only in acute- ness to the longing for white flannels and a cricket belt of red and white stripes. He looked so brave and splendid in that jacket which could not even be made to button up and left him so vulnerable at all points. I can still see the exact place where this _happened, in the Backs at Cambridge, close by the gate into John's. The beauti- ful coat-of-arms over the gateway held no heraldic joys for me that day. I had been publicly shamed, and even now to meet someone walking cheerfully without a great- coat while I am wrapped up is to taste something of the old bitterness. - - For the shame produced by the hardy man who can keep warm there is sonic compensation in the sight of one who is not hardy enough and so is obviously frozen. " Fine time for them as is well wroppcd up " were the words of the polar bear when he was practising his skating, and observe here a nice discernment of character. We arc specially told that he said it to himself; he did not try to make converts but hugged the reflection that he was warm and that other foolish persons were cold. Foolish they are if. as is common, they have laid down rules about the casting of clouts on a particular date, and the not resuming them until some other date, fixed not by the temperature but the almanack. We need have no more sympathy with them than with those who will not light a fire out of season. Rightly considered, there is no fire so gloatingly agreeable as that which is lighted on a cold, wet, summer's day. It is like the bottle of champagne which we cannot on principle afford to give to our friends, but reserve for some domestic occasion when the whim shall seize us. There is a little house in the Welsh hills where there used to be a fire in the drawing-room every night throughout the summer, and the sound of its crackling mingled with the never- ending drip from the trees. No Christmas fire, decked out with all Pickwickian trimmings, could ever rival the perpetual surprise of its welcome.
The passion for clinging to things supposed to be seasonable must be deeply planted in our nature. It is not merely that we—or at least the sillier of us---- refuse to go to the trouble of putting-on thicker clothes though We are shivering ; we will go to the trouble of taking them off when we think—Heaven knows how erro- neously—that the season is appropriate. The passengers troop up the gangway on to the liner's deck all more or less top-coated, but within half an hour of embarking many of them will have vanished into their cabins and re- appeared to flout the wind in flannels: Their white trousers are as symbolic of folly as my mittens arc of sturdy common sense.
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