the uncomfortablest material in the world for a night shirt, yet plenty used it for that — tax collectors, and reformers, and one-horse kings with a defective title, and those sorts of people; then you put on your shoes — flat-boats roofed over with interleaving bands of steel — and screw your clumsy spurs into the heels.

Next you buckle your greaves on your legs, and your cuisses on your thighs; then come your backplate and your breastplate, and you begin to feel crowded; then you hitch onto the breastplate the half-petticoat of broad overlapping bands of steel which hangs down in front but is scolloped out behind so you can sit down, and isn’t any real improvement on an inverted coal scuttle, either for looks or for wear, or to wipe your hands on; next you belt on your sword; then you put your