We are wont to think of our Puritan forbears, indeed we are determined to think of them, garbed in sombre sad-colored garments, in a life devoid of color, warmth, or fragrance. But sad color was not dismal and dull save in name; it was brown in tone, and brown is warm, and being a primitive color is, like many primitive things, cheerful. Old England was garbed in hearty honest russet, even in the days of our colonization. Read the list of the garments of any master of the manor, of the honest English yeoman, of our own sturdy English emigrants from manor and farm in Suffolk and Essex. What did they wear across seas? What did they wear in the New World? What they wore in England, namely: Doublets of leathers, all brown in tint; breeches of various tanned skins and hides; untanned leather shoes; jerkins of “filomot” or “phillymort” (feuille morte), dead-leaf color; buff-coats of fine buff leather; tawny camlet cloaks and jackets of “du Boys” (which was wood color); russet hose; horseman’s coats of tan-colored linsey-woolsey or homespun ginger-lyne or brown perpetuana; fawn-colored mandillions and deer-colored cassocks—all brown; and sometimes a hat of natural beaver. Here is a “falding” doublet of “treen color”—and what is treen but wooden and wood color is brown again. It was a fitting dress for their conditions of life. The colonists lived close to nature—they touched the beginnings of things; and we are close to nature when all dress in russet. The homely “butternuts” of the Kentucky mountains express this; so too does khaki, a good, simple native dye and stuff; so eagerly welcomed, so closely cherished, as all good and primitive things should be. [Illustration: Governor John Endicott] So when I think of my sturdy Puritan forbears in the summer planting of Salem and of Boston, I see them in “honest russet kersey”; gay too with the bright stamell-red of their waistcoats and the grain-red linings of mandillions; scarlet-capped are they, and enlivened with many a great scarlet-hooded cloak. I see them in this attire on shipboard, where they were greeted off Salem with “a smell from the shore like the smell of a garden”; I see them landing in happy June amid “sweet wild strawberries and fair single roses.” I see them walking along the little lanes and half-streets in which for many years bayberry and sweet-fern lingered in dusty fragrant clumps by the roadside. “Scented with Cædar and Sweet Fern From Heats reflection dry,” wrote of that welcoming shore one colonist who came on the first ship, and noted in rhyme what he found and saw and felt and smelt. And I see the forefathers standing under the hot little cedar trees of the Massachusetts coast, not sober in sad color, but cheery in russet and scarlet; and sweetbrier and strawberries, bayberry and cedar, smell sweetly and glow genially in that summer sunlight which shines down on us through all these two centuries.