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Updated: June 10, 2025
In his original mood, Ebbo would rather have stood before the Diet in his home-spun blue than have figured in cloth of gold at a burgher's expense; but he had learned to love his uncle, he regarded the marriage portion as family property, and moreover he sorely longed to feel himself and his brother well mounted, and scarcely less to see his mother in a velvet gown.
Clothing, spices, fruits, toys, household furniture, we lay contributions on the whole world for the most frugal meal, for the humblest dwelling. We need the best work of every nation and every nation asks our best of us. The day of home-brewed ale, of home-made bread, and home-spun clothing is already past with us.
"That is easy enough for you, Charles," said the doctor, "who have had your broad acres to support you, and no necessity for expenditure or show of any kind; who might go from Monday morning till Saturday night in home-spun, and never give any thing beyond home-brewed and gooseberry wine, with a chance bottle of port to your visiters while I, Heaven help me! was obliged to dash in a well-appointed equipage, entertain, and appear to be doing a great deal in my profession, when a guinea would pine in solitude for a week together in my pocket."
With the conceit, therefore, of all my noble family, I was prompted to go forth and visit other and better worlds, and to seek a sphere better adapted to the display of my presumed abilities, than that afforded by our domestic senate and home-spun society.
There came from the direction of the Alamo the steady rat-tat-tat of rifles. The hours went by but the cannon remained silent. A little group of lean-faced men were crouching on the flat roof of the large out-building. The most of them were clad in fringed garments of buckskin; here and there was one in a hickory shirt and home-spun jeans.
Also thou must do off thy Raven gear lest we meet any in the twilight as we go up to the house; and here have I to hand home-spun raiment such as our war- taken thralls wear, which shall serve thy turn well enough; but this thou needst not do on till the time is at hand for our departure; and then I will bring thee away, and bestow thee in a bower hard by the hall; and when thou art within, I may so look to it that none shall go in there, or if they do, they shall see nought in thee save a carle known to them by name.
And now there are people on the road, slender, barefooted, brown women in dark wine-coloured woollen skirts and scarlet cloth bodices much the worse for wear, treading lightly under half-a-quintal weight of grapes; well-to-do peasant men galantuomini, they are all called in Calabria driving laden mules before them, their dark blue jackets flung upon one shoulder, their white stockings remarkably white, their short home-spun breeches far from ragged, as a rule, but their queer little pointed hats mostly colourless and weather-beaten.
Ivan Ivanovich Tushin was a tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty-eight, with strongly-marked features, a dark, thick beard, and large grey rather timid eyes, and hands disproportionately large, with broad nails. He wore a grey coat and a high-buttoned vest, with a broad turned-down home-spun collar.
Long and of snowy whiteness is his hair, and glossy white as threads of purest silver is his beard his hat, of quaker broadness in the brim, is generally encircled, in the early days of Spring, with a wreath of the common primrose, and his dark cloth mantle, of home-spun fabric, hangs gracefully on his shoulders, showing underneath it the dark red sash that girds his still healthy and vigorous frame.
My hostess showed me some coarse bed-linen lately woven for her in the village. Calico sheets, she said, were much cheaper, but she preferred this durable home-spun even at three times the price. An old woman in the village still plied the loom, working up neighbours' materials at three francs a day.
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