Chapter 15 Chapter Fourteen Tracing the Origin

Although Tom reassured Hattie with words, he privately still considered that Hattie might be a ghost, for two reasons: first, that there seemed to be no other possibility; Untenable - if Hattie wasn't a ghost, that probably meant he was a ghost himself.As soon as this idea appeared, Tom didn't dare to continue thinking about it. On the afternoon of their quarrel, Tom admired Hatty's method of argument--though he was careful not to let Hatty see it.Hattie had a girl's keen eye for clothes, and she used it against him in debates.Tom wished he could do the same.But he found that he had only a vague impression of what the people in the garden looked like.Yes, he had a very definite general feeling that they dressed differently from himself and his aunt and uncle.But as for what is different, he can only use the word "old-fashioned" to describe it.For example, the maid Susan and Hattie's aunt both wear long dresses that almost drag the floor.

If Hattie was a ghost, their clothes would be old-fashioned, of course.But to prove it, Tom would have to be able to ascertain what period the people in the garden were wearing, and thus of what era Hattie was. He thought he knew where to find the material.More than once he had noticed that on the shelf of his aunt's kitchen, besides Mrs. Beeton's Cookbook and other cookbooks, was an alluring copy of All Things Revealed.Now, while his aunt was out shopping, he sneaked out of bed to fetch the book. He looked it up in the index "Clothes - Previous Styles of Clothing." Neither "Style" nor "Previous" entries have any content.And under "Clothes" there were some subheadings that Tom would have found interesting if they were different from the usual ones—"loose fit is warmer than tight fit," "fireproof coating."But there is no mention of changes in fashion in history.He felt depressed, as if he had been invited to someone's house, expecting a warm reception, and knocked on the door to find no one there.

Happily, before he closed the book, Tom stumbled upon some other material which was useful to him.One page was titled tactfully: Virtue Often Buried With Remains.On this page he saw a table of monarchies from the Norman Conquest to the present day.He remembered Hatty's mention of an English monarch once.They were looking at Abel's little stack of books in the heating room.Hattie pointed out that the top book was the Bible, because Abel believed that the Bible was supreme, "just like the Queen ruled the whole of England".That said, Hattie lived in an era when a queen ruled England, not a male king.Tom looked up the list of monarchies: there have only been very few queens in history.In this way, the scope is narrowed at once: for example.There's no way Hatti lived in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth centuries, because according to the Reveal, there were only male kings then.By the same token, Hatty could not have lived during most of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.All that remains are the rest of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and most of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Tom returned "All Things Revealed".Later, when he was alone in the suite again, he stole around quietly for books that might provide useful information.In the bedroom of his uncle and aunt, he had a harvest. There was a whole set of "Encyclopedia Britannica" in the special glass-door bookcase within reach of Uncle Allen's bed. Tom looks up the word 'clothing' and it says 'see 'clothing'' so he finds 'clothing'.Tom was a little discouraged when he saw several large pages full of densely packed small print in two columns.He preferred to look at illustrations, though none of them looked exactly like the clothes the men in the garden were wearing.

In the previous illustrations, he noticed a peculiar phenomenon.Men wore all sorts of leggings, but no one wore trousers—the first pair of trousers, typically, were worn by a fashionable French man in the early Victorian era.At least Tom knew that all the men and boys he saw in the garden wore trousers--except Edgar, who sometimes wore a kind of breeches with woolen stockings. Tom chased after the victory, took out the TON-VES volume of "Encyclopedia" and found the entry "pants".There are no illustrations, but the text is relatively short.In order to clarify the misunderstanding, it defines trousers at the beginning: "A kind of clothing worn by men, covering each leg separately, and the length is from the waist to the foot." Yes, Tom agreed with this statement, and he continued to read carefully. go down.It seems that the wearing of trousers was not introduced until the early nineteenth century.The Duke of Wellington also caused a stir for wearing trousers.The article ends: "They were met with outcry among the clergy and in the universities. (See 'Apparel')"

Now Tom felt he had enough information to organize his case. "Hatty lived in a time when men wore trousers, so it couldn't have been earlier than the nineteenth century, when trousers first came into fashion. Good." He remembered the words in "Revealed" again: "There was a queen who ruled England in the nineteenth century: Queen Victoria, who ruled from 1837 to 1919. She must be the queen that Hattie said. And then There's the fashionable French man in trousers, he belongs to the early Victorian era. Hattie belongs to this era. And this era is more than a hundred years ago, so if Hattie was a little girl, he must be dead now, I All that can be seen in the garden is a ghost."

Tom felt that the evidence was conclusive, but he double-checked it with a doubt.He thought that his serious attitude would definitely make his uncle feel relieved. His question was: What happened to the long skirts worn by the women in the garden?When were they popular? At this time, Aunt Gwen came back from shopping, and Tom was already lying down and fighting as if nothing happened. " "So, in the early Victorian era, for example, did women just wear long skirts?" "Oh, yes, all through the Victorian era and beyond," said my aunt. "Well, there must be a lot of people alive today who remember long skirts very well!"

But Tom wasn't interested in how recently the dresses had been in fashion. He was only interested in the distant past, and all he wanted to do was to prove that Hattie belonged to that period, and was now a ghost--a little early Victorian ghost.Well, all the information he has shows that.The problem had been satisfactorily resolved, so he put it behind him.