Full-trimmed bonnet. Tartan jacket, vest, kilt, and cross-belt. Tartan belted plaid. Pair of hose, made up from cloth. Tartan stockings, with yellow garters. Two pairs of brogues. Silver-mounted purse and belt. Target with spear. Broadsword. Pair of pistols and bullet mould. Dirk. Knife and fork. The garb was completed by a feather, or, in the case of the common people, a tuft of heather, pine, holly, or oak, in the bonnet. Personal decoration was always considered a more important matter than home decoration or even home comforts. Hair was used for making clothing at one time, for we are told Ossian Fin Mac Coul was “arrayed in Hieland plaidis of hair,” but wool was the general material, and so long as wool was worn, so long—it is said—was rheumatism unknown in the Highlands. In colours green and black predominated, with an occasional stripe of red. The number of colours indicated the rank of the wearer, a King or a Chief having seven, a Druid six, and other nobles four, while the very poor people had their plaids plain. The dyes were got from herbs, and the colours are said to have been so “fast” as to keep for two hundred years. The Celts were proud of the grandeur of their tartans, and an old song makes one of them, when wooing a Lowland lass, say:— “Bra sall the sett o’ your braid tartan be If ye will gang to the Highlands wi’ me.” The rigorous Disarming Act, passed in 1747, created what was perhaps the most critical time in the history of the tartan. The pipes and the tartan were banned as treasonable things, and marks of extreme disloyalty to the House of Hanover. The law expressly enacted that “neither man nor boy, except such as are employed as officers and soldiers, shall, on any pretence, wear or put on the clothes commonly called Highland clothes, viz., the plaid, philabeg or little kilt, trowse, shoulder-belts, or any part whatsoever of what peculiarly belongs to the Highland garb, and that no tartan or party-coloured plaid or stuff shall be used for greatcoats, or for upper coats, on pain of imprisonment for six months, without the option of a fine, for the first offence, and transportation for seven years for the second.” This was stringent enough, and it nearly strangled all that was peculiar to the Highlands. But, thanks principally to the patriotic exertions of the then Duke of Montrose, the ban was removed in 1782, and the Highland garb restored to favour. It is now worn by five British regiments. The Gordons wear the Gordon tartan, the Camerons the Erracht-Cameron, the Seaforths the Mac Kenzie, the Argyll and Sutherlands the Sutherland, and the Black Watch a special tartan closely resembling the Sutherland. Both battalions of the Gordons, and one each of the other four regiments, are now in South Africa.