A Gentleman Vagabond and Some OthersSmith, Francis Hopkinson
General
A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others
Smith, Francis Hopkinson
Short stories; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
He was so ugly,--outside, I mean: long and lank, flat-chested, shrunken,
round-shouldered, stooping when he walked; body like a plank, arms and
legs like split rails, feet immense, hands like paddles, head set on a
neck scrawny as a picked chicken's, hair badly put on and in patches, some
about his head, some around his jaws, some under his chin in a half
moon,--a good deal on the back of his hands and on his chest. Nature had
hewn him in the rough and had left him with every axe mark showing.
He wore big shoes tied with deer hide strings and nondescript breeches
that wrinkled along his knotted legs like old gun covers. These were
patched and repatched with various hues and textures,--parts of another
pair,--bits of a coat and fragments of tailor's cuttings. Sewed in their
seat was half of a cobbler's apron,--for greater safety in sliding over
ledges and logs, he would tell you. Next came a leather belt polished
with use, and then a woolen shirt,--any kind of a shirt,--cross-barred or
striped,--whatever the store had cheapest, and over that a waistcoat with
a cotton back and some kind of a front, looking like a state map, it had
so many colored patches. There was never any coat,--none that I remember.
When he wore a coat he was another kind of a Jonathan,--a store-dealing
Jonathan, or a church-going Jonathan, or a town-meeting Jonathan,--not the
"go-a-fishin'," or "bee-huntin'," or "deer-stalkin'" Jonathan whom I knew.
There was a wide straw hat, too, that crowned his head and canted with the
wind and flopped about his neck, and would have sailed away down many a
mountain brook but for a faithful leather strap that lay buried in the
half-moon whiskers and held on for dear life. And from under the rim of
this thatch, and half hidden in the matted masses of badly adjusted hair,
was a thin, peaked nose, bridged by a pair of big spectacles, and
somewhere below these, again, a pitfall of a mouth covered with twigs of
hair and an underbrush of beard, while deep-set in the whole tangle, like
still pools reflecting the blue and white of the sweet heavens above, lay
his eyes,--eyes that won you, kindly, twinkling, merry, trustful, and
trusting eyes. Beneath these pools of light, way down below, way down
where his heart beat warm, lived Jonathan.
I know a fruit in Mexico, delicious in flavor, called Timburici, covered
by a skin as rough and hairy as a cocoanut; and a flower that bristles
with thorns before it blooms into waxen beauty; and there are agates
encrusted with clay and pearls that lie hidden in oysters. All these
things, somehow, remind me of Jonathan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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