Jonathan by Francis Hopkinson Smith — Read

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.