“Oh, I won’t need an overcoat for a month yet. Why, there hasn’t been a bit of frost up our way.” Phil was already appalled by the extent of his order.
“True enough,” said the salesman, “but it doesn’t do to go out in a dress-suit without an overcoat, you know, unless you’re merely stepping from your door to a carriage; and it’s hardly the thing even then.”
“Why, Judge Dickman——”
“Oh, yes, those old judges, who wear swallow-tails day in and day out, can do it; nothing wrong about it, of course,—only a matter of taste; but a young fellow don’t like to make himself conspicuous, you know.”
Phil meekly purchased an overcoat, and hurried away with a heavy load on his conscience. More than three-quarters of the hundred dollars his father had given him was already gone or mortgaged; he had meant to spend none of it, except for some things which he knew his mother craved. Fortunately, he had brought some savings of his own; and, as he informed himself, hair-cutting was not an expensive operation, and the clothing-salesman had told him that new hats did not cost much. He had nothing else to spend money for, except a watch-chain; his father had told him to buy one. Indeed, had not his father told him to buy clothes?—“lots of them,” were the old gentleman’s exact words. But could his father have known about evening suits and fall overcoats?
Phil continued in this vein of thought after he had dropped into a barber’s chair, but was startled out of it by finding a lather-brush passing over his face. He struggled, and exclaimed,—
“I wanted my hair cut.”
“Yes, sir, so I heard you say; but when shaving has to be done too we like to have that out of the way first. But I beg your pardon, perhaps you were raising a beard?”
“No,” said Phil, settling himself again in the chair. At Haynton young men shaved only on Saturday nights; Phil himself had shaved only three days before, yet here was another unexpected expense imposed upon him by New York custom. Half an hour afterward he emerged from that shop with the not entirely satisfactory assurance that his oldest friend would not know him at sight: and when he had bought a new hat and surveyed himself in a long mirror he was not certain that he would know himself if he were to encounter another mirror by accident. The replacement of his hard-rubber watch-guard by a thin chain plated with gold completed the metamorphosis, and a bootblack whose services he declined set his mind at rest by calling him a dude.
What next to do he scarcely knew. An inclination to go back to the sloop and see how Sol Mantring was getting along at discharging the cargo was suppressed by the thought of what Sol and the crew would say if they saw him in his new suit. The countryman has some grand qualities that denizens of cities would do well to imitate, but not all his moral courage can keep him from feeling uncomfortable when first he displays himself in new clothes to old associates. Country youths have sometimes run away from home,—gone to sea, the city, the devil—anywhere—rather than undergo this dreadful ordeal.