ooked
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
the armpit; 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 plow, 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.

To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as