Arcadians though we were, our costume bore no resemblance to the
beribboned doublets, silk breeches and stockings, and slippers fastened
with artificial roses, that distinguish the pastoral people of poetry
and the stage. In outward show, I humbly conceive, we looked rather
like a gang of beggars, or banditti, than either a company of honest
laboring-men, or a conclave of philosophers. Whatever might be our
points of difference, we all of us seemed to have come to Blithedale
with the one thrifty and laudable idea of wearing out our old clothes.
Such garments as had an airing, whenever we strode afield! Coats with
high collars and with no collars, broad-skirted or swallow-tailed, and
with the waist at every point between the hip and arm-pit; pantaloons
of a dozen successive epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the
humiliations of the wearer before his lady-love,--in short, we were a
living epitome of defunct fashions, and the very raggedest presentment
of men who had seen better days. It was gentility in tatters. Often
retaining a scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for
the denizens of Grub Street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood
by agricultural labor; or Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full
experiment; or Candide and his motley associates at work in their
cabbage garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and
most clumsily patched in the rear.
We might have been sworn comrades
to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other
points of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have served
admirably to stick up for a scarecrow. And the worst of the matter
was, that the first energetic movement essential to one downright
stroke of real labor was sure to put a finish to these poor
habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to honest
homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to the plan
recommended, I think, by Virgil,--"Ara nudus; sere nudus, "--which as
Silas Foster remarked, when I translated the maxim, would be apt to
astonish the women-folks.
After a reasonable training, the yeoman life throve well with us. Our
faces took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and our
shoulders in breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked as if
they had never been capable of kid gloves. The plough, the hoe, the
scythe, and the hay-fork grew familiar to our grasp. The oxen
responded to our voices. We could do almost as fair a day's work as
Silas Foster himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake at daybreak
with only a little stiffness of the joints, which was usually quite
gone by breakfast-time.