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.
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