The Morris dancers’ dress has fallen on somewhat evil days of late years. The best they can do is a white suit of duck or flannel with trousers, short knee breeches, or even ordinary dark cloth trousers with a white shirt. The shirt is decorated with ribbons and rosettes, and sometimes a double baldric is worn crossed on the chest and hanging down at the sides. The bells are sewn on to a pad, and a pair which I have is made of long bits of coloured cloth such as a sailor uses to make a hearthrug with, the bells sewn in between. This was got from a pawnshop in Oxford with a pipe and tabor, a pathetic sign of the decay of national gaiety! The hat is sometimes a box hat, sometimes a bowler, sometimes a cap, but it must be gaily decorated with ribbons and artificial flowers, bits of feather, or anything that comes in handy. Mr Brookes, of Godley Hill, who came to London to teach the Lancashire dances, wore a bowler hat covered tightly with white calico, and over that a mass of flowers, and ribbons hanging down behind. I confess that this curious mixture of a traditional ceremonial dress and the modern bowler hat does not attract me nor appeal to my sense of the fitness of things, but I think that for present-day performance one must either adopt the least objectionable form of present-day holiday dress, which is usually white flannel, add as much colour as possible in ribbons and sash, and leave it at that, or if any fancy dress is adopted I think it is best to adopt the Elizabethan peasants’ holiday dress and add the bells, ribbons, etc., as it was during her reign that the Morris dance was very usually danced at fairs and festivals. The only woman’s dress described in old writers is that of Maid Marian, but as the character was taken by a man dressed as a woman, who was very grotesquely dressed, it is better to-day to adopt a very simple dress, such as a cotton frock and a sun bonnet, with a bunch of ribbons at the waist. Every girl should have a different colour, though the general style may be the same. The shoes of the dancers should be ordinary walking shoes with low heels and no pointed toes, because these dances were danced in the open air and on the open road. A good dancer can make the “bells speak” even on a boarded floor, and that is all that is necessary. I think that any sort of thin ballet shoe is quite out of place and spoils the character of an open-air dance. V. EXTRA CHARACTERS In the days when the Morris dance was an integral part of the people’s life it was no one’s business to make exact records in writing either of the dance itself, of the ceremonies connected with it, or of the characters associated with it. It is therefore very difficult to differentiate with any exactitude just where the Morris dance merged into the sword dance, and just where the dances were merged into the Mummers’ plays and other early pageants and ceremonies.