THE BROWN HAT.

‘My son,’ said the wisest of modern men—whose name, of course, it were malicious to mention, and foolish also, the object being to promulgate charity, not to excite rancour—‘My son, if you would go through life easily, I can give you no better rule of conduct than this: Never wear a brown hat in Friesland.’

Now, though this piece of counsel may sound as hieroglyphical and mysterious as the well known precept by Mr. Malaprop administered to his offspring, when the latter was about to quit home, ‘Evil communication is worth two in the bush,’ it is nevertheless susceptible of the clearest and most explicit interpretation. Though the fruits of particular and personal experience, it may be applied to every man who wears a hat under the sun, the moon, the seven stars, or the Seven Dials! let alone the Seven United Provinces!

The Brown Hat whence this saying sprung, was merely a hat of common quality and uncommon comfort; soft to the head, not stiff; a screen for eyes from the sun; a thing taking no place among the traveller’s luggage—claiming no package of its own, and thus offering no wrangling-stock to those most tiresome of Jacks among all Jacks-in-office—to wit, Custom-house officers. It was a hat which the Hatto of hats must have accredited as the very perfection of a quiet, middle-aged traveller’s vade mecum; something dull-looking, it is true, for those whose thoughts are ‘wide-awake;’ something vulgar, for any one troubled by aristocratic fancies as to his covering, and who loves not to be confounded with his butterman; but withal a hat to be defended by every man of sense, to be clung to by every creature capable of headaches; a hat one could be bumped about in during a day of sixteen hours, in carriage, cart, or third-class railway vehicle; a hat one could lie in bed in for nightcap, or sit upon for cushion; a kindly, comforting, unobtrusive hat—brown, because it was of the felt’s natural colour, pliant as a piece of silk, submissive to wind, impervious to rain. What can we say more? A castor, as the Pilgrim’s Pollux put it, ‘fit to be buried in.’

Yet such was the hat, and none other, which—save your nerves be of granite, your cheeks of brass, and your patience the patience of a beaver—you are hereby solemnly warned not to wear in Friesland. In London, when you please and where you please, but not in Meppel, and not in Zwolle, and not in Sneek, and, most of all, not in the market-place at Leenwarden. As wisely might you have tried to walk down a village-street, in Lancashire, on Lifting-Monday (thirty years ago), thinking to escape from the obliging maids and jolly wives, who lurked behind their doors, bent on tossing every passing male in a kitchen chair, as have hoped for ten seconds of peace,—supposing that in Friesland (two autumns since) you took your walks abroad wearing a Brown Hat!

It will be, peradventure, imagined by those who are not strong in their geography, or who have not studied the Book of Dresses, or who entertain little curiosity concerning one of the most noticeable and original districts in Europe,—that these touchy Friesland folk themselves don or doff nothing worth an Englishman turning his head to admire; carry aloft what all the well-bred world carries,—and therefore cannot afford to let any one thrive, save under the shadow of the ‘regulation 134beaver,’ to which all polite Europe subscribes. Yet the case happens to be, that if there be a land in which perpetual wonderment could make the traveller wry-necked, that land is North Holland. Hong-Kong can hardly be stranger, either in its composition or its maintenance. So Sci herself (in Mr. Sealy’s capital Chinese tale) did not boast a head-tire more ‘express and surprising,’ than the gentlewomen of all ages, through whose active decision and passive contempt the Brown Hat had to run the gauntlet.

Let us see if we can sketch this—though by no means catholically sure, that some stratum of use or ornament, may not have been overlooked in our specification. First, it is conceived that the hair upon the head of the Frieslander, must be cut as close as though subject to the pumpkin-shell barbarity of the pilgrim-fathers, when their scissors were intent on shearing off love-locks. Upon this closely cropped poll, comes first a knitted cap (Mrs. Loudon, perhaps, can tell whether there be an aristocratic or established stitch formula for its knitting), over that a silk scull cap. These tightly put on, the serious business of the head-gear begins. The victim is next hooped, bound, lined, circled and otherwise clasped up within gilt metal—various in its cut, provided it only fits close, ‘as some one said,’ for headaches, to throb against. The mistress of Keetje, the maid, is fond of having her kettle-cap made of gilt silver, sometimes—if she be of old family—of pure gold; and you will see her in the market-place, wearing, in addition to this precious piece of trepanning, a metal tiara, such as Grecian Queens wear upon the stage, stuck over with coarse jewels; nay, more, dangling at the sides of her face, a pair of inconceivable gilt pendants, at a distance looking like bunches of queer keys, or that minikin household furniture our English ladies now choose to suspend from their girdles. But this is not all. At the extreme angles of her forehead, Keetje’s mistress—if a person of high fashion—must stick in two little square plots or tufts of frizzled silk, to pass for curls. This done, she may put on her cap of the finest lace, with its deep border or flap behind, fashioned like the brim of the dustman’s hat, but from the costly daintiness of its material, and the creamy whiteness of the throat it lies against, somewhat more picturesque. Finally, if Keetje’s mistress be a Friesland Miss Flamborough of ‘first water’—a lady who knows the world, and has a spirit superior to old-fashioned prejudices—she must have by way of crown, all to her four caps (one of precious metals), a straw bonnet, a huge, heavy, coal-scuttle, festooned with loops and streamers of gaudy ribbon, and thriftily guarded at the edge with a hem or barrier of stout and gaudy printed chintz. Thus canopied are the comely wives and widows (maidens, possibly dispensing with the bonnet), who shrieked, clapped their hands, and, with every other possible demonstration of offence, pursued the wearer of the Brown Hat in Friesland.

On the habiliments of the male moiety of society, tediousness forbids that we should expatiate; the less, as something will thus be left to be treated on a future day, when the grave question of apparel may be more solemnly entered upon. Enough for the moment, to say that it suits the singularities of this critical land: a land in which a Swimming Lion is the ensign, and of which His Majesty Topsy-Turvy might be sovereign; a land in which there is hardly a crooked horizontal line to be found, save among the sand-hills; a land in which, with all its neatness’ care, scarce a building, be it church or market-house, palace or exchange, can be prevailed upon to stand perpendicular; a land in which for air you breathe extract of juniper, turf, tobacco, and stagnant waters, mixed; a land in which people eat cheese with their tea, and where a child that plucks a nest runs great danger of being whipped as an enemy to Church and State—guilty of trying to let in the republican ocean; a land where full-grown babies set up clockwork gentlemen and papier mâche swans, by way of animating their garden, and the weedy ponds in the same; a land where full-grown men undertake and complete some of the most magnificent enterprises which science can contrive for industry to carry out; a land of teeming plenty and of high prices; a land of bad digestions and beautiful complexions. No, the men of this land—the shippers of Dordrecht, the potters of Delft, the gardeners of Broet, and the dairy farmers of Harlingen, decked out for fair or frolic—must be to-day left with all their uncouth and indescribable finery, undescribable, it may be, for some future parable.

But as if in the above there had not been indicated enough of what yet new and strange for Pilgrim to observe and to tolerate, and to smile at, with English supercilious civility in this country, the very names of places, even (as a descendant of Dr. Dilworth inadequately remarked), ‘are neither Christian nor becoming.’ One might bring one’s mind to bear to be jeered at or stared at, in a land resounding with pompous and euphonious words—by the Wissihiccon, for instance, or on the Mississippi, or at Canandaigna, or among the Inscoraras, or when bound for Passamaquoddy. Even the prize-scold at Billingsgate was silenced and rendered meek by being called a Chrononhotonthologos.—There’s much in four syllables! But in Friesland the traveller is handed over from Workum to Higtum, and from Higtum to Midlum; thence perhaps to Boxum, and from Boxum to Hallum, Dokkum, Kollum, &c., &c., &c.; going through the whole alphabet of these ‘make-believe’ names, the very study of which on the map is enough to make properly-brought-up persons disdainful and critical! Yet, so far from feeling any proper sense of 135their own position; so far from the slightest shame or shrinking; so far from one single deprecatory ‘Pray don’t make game of us! We are decent folk after all, and well to do in the world, though some of us do come from Sueek!’—these are the people, so lost to every sense of the ridiculous at home, as to tumble, towzle, and in every other conceivable and contemptuous mode maltreat the useful, comfortable, authentic, and in every respect unobtrusively defensible Brown Hat aforesaid! Did its wearer stop before a shop-window to look wistfully at one of those stupendous jars of pickles, which with a dozen of hard eggs for each guest, form so prominent a feature of the Dutchman’s merry-making suppers; his coat-tails were sure to be pulled by some grinning child, broader than long, and in facture closely resembling Mr. Staunton’s broadly-based new chessman. Did he lean over a gate to admire some magnificent bird, the brilliant cleanlinesss of which on the green carpet, gives us a new idea of the beauty of ox or cow, a head would be picked up from the dyke-side; with a liberal emission of casual slang, and as likely as not, a stone would have been thrown—did Holland contain a single stone for a David’s sling to utter. Did he adventure along the Wall of Zwolle on a glowing autumn evening, or meekly take the second best place on the treckschuit which was to waft him down the canal from Groningen to Delfzel (a water-path in its way, as peculiar and contradictory of all received principles as any railroad ever carried over house-tops at the Minories, or through the great pleasure-gardens and greenhouses of a Sir Timothy Dod), it was always one and the same story—one and the same contempt—one and the same experience. Simple laughed with a most disconcerting and noisy sincerity; and Gentle stuffed their handkerchiefs into their mouths—held both their own sides and poked their neighbours. ‘Driving Cloud’ or other of the Ojibbeway Indians if let loose in Clare-Market, would hardly have been made to feel his conspicuousness more signally than our traveller. There was neither privacy, place, nor pity, for the Brown Hat in Friesland.

Therefore, the wisest of these in advising his son, may have meant to say to him, ‘Never throw your oddity in the teeth of other men’s oddities.’ You cannot expect immunity for your own whims, if you force them upon other people’s whims. Never expect that your ‘ism’ will find quarter among their ‘isms;’ or (to put the adage otherwise) he may have desired to recommend a reading backwards of the old maxim—worn threadbare, rather by trampling upon, than by carrying about, to wit—‘Live, and let live.’

If then you would live a quiet life in Friesland, Never wear a Brown Hat!