[Illustration: A SMALL COUNTRY BOY]
In the matter of clothes, too, the country mother, like any other mother in America, wishes her children to be becomingly attired, in full accord with such of the prevailing fashions as seem to her most suitable. In company with the greater portion of American mothers, she devotes considerable time and strength and money to the wardrobes of her boys and girls. The result is that country children are dressed strikingly like city children. Their "everyday" garments are scarcely distinguishable from the "play clothes" of city children; their "Sunday" clothes are very similar to the "best" habiliments of the boys and girls who do not live in the country.
We have all read, in the books of our grandmothers' childhood, of the children who, on the eve of going to visit their city cousins, were much exercised concerning their wearing apparel. "Would the pink frock, with the green sash, be just what was being worn to parties in the city?" the little girl of such story-books fearfully wondered. "Will boys of my age be wearing short trousers still?" the small boy dubiously queried. Invariably it transpired that pink frocks and green sashes, if in fashion at all, were never seen at parties; and that long trousers were absolutely essential, from the point of view of custom, for boys of our hero's age. Many woes were attendant upon the discovery that these half-suspected sumptuary laws were certain facts.
No present-day country boy and girl, coming from the average home to the house of city cousins, would need to feel any such qualms. Should they, five minutes' inspection of the garments of those city cousins would relieve their latent questionings. They would see that, to the casual eye, they and their cousins were dressed in the same type of raiment.
How could they fail to be? A large crop of "fashion magazines" flourishes in America. The rural free delivery brings them to the very doors of the farmhouse. By the use of mail orders the mother on the farm can obtain whatever materials the particular "fashion magazine" to which she is a subscriber advises, together with paper patterns from which she can cut anything, from "jumpers" to a "coat for gala occasions."
The approved clothes of all American children in our time are so exceedingly simple in design that any woman who can sew at all can construct them; and, in the main, the materials of which they are made are so inexpensive that even the farmer whose income is moderate in size can afford to supply them. A clergyman who had worked both in city and in country parishes once told me that he attributed the marked increase in ease and grace of manner—and, consequently, in "sociability"—among country people to-day, as compared with country people of his boyhood, very largely to the invention of paper patterns.
"Rural folk dressed in a way peculiar to themselves then," he said; "now they dress like the rest of the world. It is curious," he went on, reflectively, "but human beings, as a whole, seem unable not to be awkward in their behavior if their costumes can possibly be differentiated otherwise than by size!"
It is another queer fact that normal persons would seem to require "best" clothes. They share the spirit of Jess, in "A Window in Thrums." "But you could never wear yours, though ye had ane," said Hendry to her about the "cloak with beads"; "ye would juist hae to lock it awa in the drawers." "Aye," Jess retorted, "but I would aye ken it was there."
I have an acquaintance who is not normal in this matter. She scorns "finery," whether for use or for "locking awa." One summer she and I spent a fortnight together on a Connecticut farm. During the week the farmer and his wife, as well as their two little children, a girl and a boy, wore garments of dark-colored denim very plainly made. The children were barefooted.
"These people have sense," my acquaintance observed to me on the first day of our sojourn; "they dress in harmony with their environment."