Spatterdashes

I had a short jacket of goat's skin, the skirts coming down to about the middle of the thighs, and a pair of open-kneed breeches of the same; the breeches were made of the skin of an old he-goat, whose hair hung down such a length on either side that, like pantaloons, it reached to the middle of my legs; stockings and shoes I had none, but had made me a pair of somethings, I scarce knew what to call them, like buskins, to flap over my legs, and lace on either side like spatterdashes, but of a most barbarous shape, as indeed were all the rest of my clothes.

'I sleep with my spats on,' he says, proud that his bent for sophistication means that he allegedly wears spatterdashes at all times.

They ponder the accoutrements that, in a different register, might mark the soldiers as effeminate and superficial, macaronis or fops--the monogrammed spatterdashes and carefully-tied hair braids--as highly cathected emblems of feeling and loss.