The fact is that the feather-bonnet, and all other exaggerated and expensive head-dresses, should be as resolutely relegated to limbo as the hideous masks worn by the fighting men of Old Japan. Both were designed to overawe the enemy; but, as modern fighting is done in forage-caps, that naïve purpose cannot be carried into effect, and the object should be to provide such clothing as will best enable a man to keep himself, in the Duke of Wellington’s words, ‘clean and smart, as a soldier ought to be.’ And no headgear is smarter, none more easily kept clean, than the Glengarry bonnet. While it is hardly possible to imagine any dress better calculated to impede a soldier’s movements than the uniforms inflicted upon all arms in the service during the early years of the nineteenth century, one should not overlook the relief that was ordained in a detail that was a source of constant unnecessary trouble to the soldier. Clubbed pigtails had been transmitted as an irksome legacy from Marlborough’s army, until in 1808 the Horse Guards decreed their abolition. When Sir Arthur Wellesley landed in Mondego Bay on August 1-5 in that year, one of his first orders was that these senseless, dirty appendages were to be cut off. Never, one may believe, was an order more cheerfully obeyed. A counter-order was issued shortly after from the Horse Guards, requiring the retention of pigtails, but it was beyond the power of man to comply with it. It was easy to cut off pigtails, but they could not be replaced; and now the only vestige of a barbarous fashion in the army remains in the bow of black ribbon worn by the Welsh Fusiliers at the back of the collar of the tunic.