NEEDY knife grinder,” said the poet, “your hat has got a hole in it, and so have your breeches.” That was not necessary. You should carry a housemaid’s tidy, or whatever it may be called, the tiny compendium of needles and thread sometimes offered upon hotel dressing tables, and sew up the holes. I fear the knife grinder’s hat was of felt, a broken billycock hat, but we tramps have nothing to do with felt hats. The bowlers and the derbys and the trilbys are not our style. There was a time when men tramped in shovel hats, and I can see Parson Adams trudging along, his lank locks crowned with this lugubrious headgear. And Abraham Lincoln walked abroad in his rusty topper. But we have changed all that. We tramp in tweed hats or caps or without hats at all. We do not feel superior, but we know we are more comfortable.
Also we no longer wear cravats. In fact, a collar and tie may be secreted in a pocket of the knapsack to be unwillingly put on when it is necessary to visit a post office or a bank, a priest, or the police. But otherwise we go forth with free necks and throats, top button of shirt preferably undone.
And we do not tramp in spats or gaiters, nor in fancy waistcoats. The waistcoat is an article of attire which can be cheerfully eliminated as entirely unwanted. Undervests also are rather de trop. There are many things a man can shed. I am not qualified to say what a woman can do without, but she needs no hat with feathers, no hatpin. As I think of her in the wilderness it seems to me she can get rid of everything she commonly wears with the exception perhaps of a hair net, and then dress herself afresh in “rational attire.” The green and brown misses in the “lovely garnish of boys” are now so familiar in the United States that it is almost superfluous to describe them. A khaki blouse and knickers, green putties or stockings, and a stout pair of shoes are almost everything; very simple, very practical, and if one must think of looks while on tramp, not unbecoming.
Materials are more important than shapes. A homespun, a tweed, a cord, are better than flannel or serge or shoddy cloth. Tramping is destructive of material; sun, rain, camp-fire sparks, and hot smoke seem to reduce the resistance of cloth very rapidly. After a month, a sort of dry rot will show itself, and as you go through a wood every rotten stick or tiny thorn you happen to touch will tear a tatter in your trousers. It can be annoying and amusing. “When I am tired of looking at the view I look at your trousers,” said Lindsay to me, in the Rockies, he in the virtuous superiority of green corduroy; I in old clothes which I thought I might as well wear out on tramp. I certainly wore them out: in fact, we had to turn from the wilds towards civilization, and the poet bought me a ready-to-wear pair of cowboy’s bags.
But workmen’s trousers, suspended by workmen’s braces, are the best. Braces marked “For Policemen and Firemen” are sold in the United States. They are undoubtedly stout and will stand the strain of many jumps. You will have a cosy feeling of nothing defective in your straps, a feeling akin to that of a good conscience—much to be desired.
What remains? A jacket. It may as well be a tweed one with half-a-dozen roomy pockets. I once saw a character reader at a fair who said: “Show me your hat and I will tell you who you are.” He had plenty to guide him. I gave him mine. He said: “You, sir, are a thinker. Your thoughts have been oozing out of your head and have spoilt an excellent lining.” He held my hat up to the crowd. “This is the hat,” said he, “of a man who buys at the best shop, but wears his hat a very long while. He is both proud and economical, and is probably a Scotsman.”
Had I taken off my jacket he could probably have told me a good deal more; made bulgy with books, yet pinched by the clips of fountain pens, ink-stained, wine-stained, sun-bleached and rain-washed, fretted by camp-fire sparks, frayed and yet not torn by envious thorns; the whole well stretched, well slept in, well tramped in. Other parts of one’s attire wear out, come and go, but the jacket remains, granted a good sound indestructible jacket.
Such a jacket is warm wear. No, not in the morning, not for some hours after sunrise; not in the evening, not during the twilight hours. During the heat of the day if you wish you can take it off and, tying it into a neat bundle, fix it to the knapsack. It is pleasant to have the air break fresh on one’s perspiring chest. But the warm jacket is your friend, and after two days’ out of home you understand it. The stout jacket stands by you in the hours when you need support. You soon get used to its weight, and its thickness helps to bed the knapsack between the shoulders.
Carlyle wrote a book on clothes, the inwardness of which was that man, the straggling bifurcate animal, discovered in Eden that he was really ugly and a shame to be seen, and he has been trying to hide himself ever since, in fig leaves and phrases, phylacteries and philosophies. That shall provide the tramp’s motto: a fig leaf and a phrase. But, oh, Sartor, oh, Mr. Mallaby-Deeley, a stout fig leaf!
2. Motley