Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/251

Rh better with the landscape than his black and glossy india-rubbers. I had a suit once in which, methinks, I could glide across the fields unperceived half a mile in front of a farmer's windows. It was such a skillful mixture of browns, dark and light, properly proportioned, with even some threads of green in it, by chance. It was of loose texture and about the color of a pasture with patches of withered sweet fern and lechea. I trusted a good deal to my invisibility in it when going across lots, and many a time I was aware that to it I owed the near approach of wild animals.

No doubt my dusty and tawny cowhides surprise the street walkers who wear patent leather congress shoes, but they do not consider how absurd such shoes would be in my vocation to thread the woods and swamps in. C was saying properly enough the other day, as we were making our way through a dense patch of shrub oak, "I suppose that those villagers think we wear these old, worn hats with holes all along the corners for oddity; but Coombs, the musquash hunter and partridge and rabbit snarer, knows better. He understands us. He knows that a new and square-cornered hat would be spoiled in one excursion through the shrub oaks." When a citizen comes to take a walk with me, I commonly find that he is lame