oned and estimated
by every other. Towns on either side have a neglected population area,
but Quaker Hill has none. Pawling in its other neighborhoods has
forgotten roads, despised cabins, in which dwell persons for whom nobody
cares, drunkards, ill-doers, whom others forget and ignore. Quaker Hill
ignores no one. There are, indeed, rich and poor, but the former employ
the latter, know their state, enjoy their peculiarities, relish their
humor. It has apparently always been so. Elsewhere I have described the
measures taken by popular subscription to replace the losses suffered by
the humbler members of the community, in the tools of life (see Chapter
VII). It need not be said that the poorer members bear the rich in mind.
Every person resident on the Hill has come to partake in this sense of
the community, this practice of new Quakerism. No one is out of sight
and yet there is no dream of equality behind this communal sense. It is
as far from a communistic, as from a charitable state of mind. It is the
result of years of belief in common men and common things.

This "make believe" that commonplace things are the spiritual things was
a corollary of George Fox's life as much as of his doctrine. He opposed
pomp and ritual, salaried priests, ordinations and consecrations; he
disbelieved in "the imposition of hands." His followers therefore went
so far as to find in plainness a new sanctity. They adapted at once the
"plain garb" of the period of William Penn and Robert Barclay, and the
generations of men who followed felt themselves morally bettered by a
drab coat and breeches, a white neck-cloth, and a broad-brimmed brown
hat; the women by dresses of simple lines, low tones of color, bonnets
of peculiar shape, shielding the eyes on either side.

Of course in time this exceptional garb by its uniqueness defeated the
very desire George Fox had for "plainness." It was not commonplace but
extraordinary. Roby Osborn's garb is thus described by her biographer:
"Her wedding gown was a thick, lustreless silk, of a delightful
yellowish olive, her bonnet white. Beneath it her dark hair was smoothly
banded, and from its demure shelter her eyes looked gravely out. Her
vest was a fine tawny brown, of a sprigged pattern, both gown and vest
as artistically harmonious as the product of an Eastern loom. Pieces of
both were sewn into a patchwork quilt, now a family heirloom."[10]

For more than a century now "plainness in dress" has been ex