Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 73, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 March 1920 — GENTILITY IN HUMBLE GARB [ARTICLE]

GENTILITY IN HUMBLE GARB

Rags and Tsttors Proudly Wem by the Famous Experimsntsrs at Brook Farm. s ns s w ' “Arcadians though we were.” wrote Hawthorne of the Brooks farm experiment, “our costume bore no resemblance t<- the beribboned doublets, silk breeches and stockings, and slippers fastened with artificial roses that distinguished the pastoral people of poetry and the stage. In outward show, I humbly concede, 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 BHthedale 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 armpit; pantaloons of a doxen successive epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the humiliations of the wearer before hie lady-love; Id 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. We might have been sworn comrades to FalstafTs 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.”