Like a boy, and you will be attended to from then on to do your intimate functions by Martha or me or even one of the girls. Do underyou stand?"

We had to reply that we did. Only too well! But Aunty was right and knew about boys, for it was quite common to see kilted boys at a urinal lifting up the front of their kilts and bringing their taps out of the leg of their underwear. For that matter, boys in shorts, rather than take time to undo their flies, also pull up the leg of thier shorts and relieve themselves that way!

Smocks or tunics used to be worn by boys in Victorian and Edwardian days after they graduated from their white baby dresses, and often they wore the dresses until they were five, six or seven years of age. Until that time no distinction in sex, as far as clothes were concerned, was made, the underwear being as white, as lace trimmed, as starched for the boys as for the girls. If the boy was small of stature, he might remain in dresses for even longer, until he i was eight or nine or even ten years of age.

Once out of dresses, the boy of that era did not go straight into trousers, but went through an intermediate stage of clothing. At least, he still wore a kind of frock over what trousers

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he did have on. These frocks now went by the name of tunics or smocks, so that the boy still looked and felt as if he were still in petti-

coats.

These tunics were long enough to almost cover the trousers the boy might wear, sometimes bloomers of the same material as the tunic, sometimes white linen drawers, but now mercifully for the boy without the dainty lace and ribbon trimmings. Also the boy no longer wore a petti-

coat.

There were different styles of smocks on tunics. A favorite was the Russian box tunic, which allowed the bloomers of the wearer to peep out from under the hem. This tunic might be in the nautical motif, for that age also liked the boy children to be dressed as little sailors in keeping with the power of its navy which guarded its far flung empire. But as in this intermediate stage the boy was not yet ready for proper trousers, the only nautical motif could be on his frock or tunic.

Naturally if a boy had been kept in his baby and little girl dresses past the usual age for graduating from them, he did not go immediately into trousered suits and sailor suits, but had to enter this intermediate stage of smocks on tunics, even although he was already past the

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