Now must I first describe to the reader my wonderful dress at that time, before I tell him how I fared further. For my clothing and behaviour were altogether so strange, astonishing, and uncouth, that the governor had my picture painted. Firstly, my hair had for two years and a half never been cut either Greek, German, or French fashion, nor combed nor curled nor puffed, but stood in its natural wildness with more than a year's dust strewn on it instead of hair plunder or powder, or whatever they call the fools' work--and that so prettily that I looked with my pale face underneath it, like a great white owl that is about to bite or else watching for a mouse. And because I was accustomed at all times to go bareheaded and my hair was curly, I had the look of wearing a Turkish turban. The rest of my garb answered to my head-gear; for I had on my hermit's coat, if I may now call it a coat at all, for the stuff out of which 'twas fashioned at first was now clean gone and nothing more remaining of it but the shape, which more than a thousand little patches of all colours, some put side by side, some sewn upon one another with manifold stitches, still represented. Over this decayed and yet often improved coat I wore the hair-shirt mantle-fashion, for I needed the sleeves for breeches and had cut them off for that purpose. But my whole body was girt about with iron chains, most deftly disposed crosswise behind and before like the pictures of St. William; so that all together made up a figure like them that have once been captured by the Turks and now wander through the land begging for their friends still in captivity. My shoes were cut out of wood and the laces woven out of strips of lime-bark: and my feet looked like boiled lobsters, as I had had on stockings of the Spanish national colour or had dyed my skin with logwood. In truth I believe if any conjurer, mountebank, or stroller had had me and had given me out for a Samoyede or a Greenlander, he would have found many a fool that would have wasted a kreutzer on me. Yet though any man in his wits could easily conclude, from my thin and starved looks and my decayed clothes, I came neither from a cook-shop nor a lady's bower, and still less had played truant from any great lord's court, nevertheless I was strictly examined in the guard-room, and even as the soldiers gaped at me so was I filled with wonder at the mad apparel of their officer to whom I must answer and give account. I knew not if it were he or she: for he wore his hair and beard French fashion, with long tails hanging down on each side like horse-tails, and his beard was so miserably handled and mutilated that between mouth and nose there were but a few hairs, and those had come off so ill that one could scarce see them. And not less did his wide breeches leave me in no small doubt of his sex, being such that they were as like a woman's petticoats as a man's breeches. So I thought, if this be a man he