CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY STEPHEN E. WHICHER MEMORIAL BOOK COLLECTION Gift of MRS. ELIZABETH T. WHICHER UNDERGRADUATE LIBRARY Date Due im^ 1^6?^ ^ iVHitf PRINTED IN U. S. A. (SJ NO. 2323; PS 2029.S9''l886 "'""'*' '■"'"^ Suburban sketches: 3 1924 014 393 650 a Cornell University y Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014393650 Mritingflf of Milliam a>. fgoiotUs, VENETIAN LIFE. i2mo $1.50 ITALIAN JOURNEYS. i2mo 1.50 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. lUustrated. iimo 1.50 Summer Edition. Illustrated. i6mo, paper covers 50 " Little Classic " style. iSmo 1.25 A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE. lUustrated. izmo 1.50 Sumnter Ediiitm, Illustrated. i6nio, paper covers .50 "Little Classic '' style. iSmo 1.25 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. lUustrated. i2mo 1.50 A FOREGONE CONCLUSION. i2mo 1.5a THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK. i2mo 1.50 THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. i2mo 1.50 The eight i2mo volumes, $12.00 ; half calf, $24.00. A DAY'S PLEASURE, etc. "Modem Classics," No. 32. 32mo .75 School Edition. 321110 40 ♦ HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Publbhets, Boston. She lighted a potent pipe." See page 22. SUBURBAN SKETCHES. W. D. HOWELLS, ACnroBOF " VUSETIAir UFS," "ttat.tau JOUBHBTS," RVt TENTH EDITION WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY AUGUSTUS HOPPIN. BOSTON: HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. Wit EttoteiHe Preeci, CamiirOis;. 1886. Entered according to Act of Congrras, in the year 1S72, hj WnLIAM D. HOWELLS, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of MassachusettB. BITEBSIDE, CAUBBIDGE : 8TBBE0TTPED AND PRINTED BT B. 0. HOiraHION AND COUPANT. OOl^^TEKTS. Mm. Mrs. Johnson ......... u DooKSTEP Acquaintance 33 A Pedestrian Tour 60 Bt Horse-Cab to Boston ....,,, 91 A Dav's Pleasure US A Romance of Beal Life 171 Scene ••'.».,,,,, 190 JuiiiLEE Days 195 Some Lessons from the School of Moeam . . 220 Flitting , . .841 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Viun IHX UORTED A FOTENT FIFE ...... Front, " BUT I SUFPOSB THIS WmE IS NOT MADE OF GBAPES, BIOITOB ? " 43 UJOKUra ABOUT, 1 SAW TWO -WOMEN 65 THE TOUNO IiAST IN BLACK, WHO AUGBTED AT A MOST OBDI- KABT LITTI.E STBEET 93 THAT SWEET TOTOG BLONDE, WHO ABBIYES BY MOST TRAINS 119 FRANK AND LrCT STALKED AHEAD, WITH SHAWLS DBAOOINO FROM THEIR ARMS 164 THET SKIRMISH ABODT HIM WITH EVERT SORT OP QUEBT . 161 A GAUNT FIGURE OF FORLORN AND CURIOUS SMARTNESS . . 171 IBE SFECTACLB AS WE BEHELD IT 199 VACANT AND CEREMONIOUS ZEAL .••••• S59 STJBTJRBAl^ SKETCHES. SUBURBAN SKETCHES. MRS. JOHNSON. It was on a morning of the lovely New England- May that we left the horse-car, and, spreading our umbrellas, walked down the street to our new home in Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain so finely blent by the influences of this fortunate climate, that no flake knew itself from its sister drop, or could be better identifled by the people against whom they beat in unison. A vernal gale from the east fanned our cheeks and pierced our marrow and chilled our blood, while the raw, cold green of the adventurous grass on the borders of the sopping side- walks gave, as it peered through its veil of melting snow and freezing rain, a peculiar cheerfulness to the landscape. Here and there in the vacant lots aban- doned hoop-skirts defied decay ; and near the half- finished wooden houses, empty mortar-beds, and bits of lath and slate strewn over the scarred and muti- lated ground, added their interest to the scene. A shaggy drift himg upon the trees before our own house (which had been built some years earlier), whils its swollen eaves wept silently and incessantly 12 SUBXIKBAN SKETCHES. upon the embankments lifting its base several feet above the common level. This heavenly weather, which the Pilgrim Fathers, with the idea of turning their thoughts efiFectiially from earthly pleasures, came so far to discover, con- tinued with sHght amelioration throughout the month of May and far into June ; and it was a matter of constant amazement with one who had known less austere climates, to behold how vegetable life strug- gled with the hostile skies, and, in an atmosphere as chiU and damp as that of a cellar, shot forth the buds and blossoms upon the pear-trees, called out the sour Puritan courage of the currant-bushes, taught a reck- less native grape-vine to wander and wanton over the southern side of the fence, and decked the banks with violets as fearless and as fragile as New England girls ; so that about the end of June, when the heav- ens relented and the sun blazed out at last, there was little for him to do but to redden and darken the daring finiits that had attained almost their fiill growth without his countenance. Then, indeed, Charlesbridge appeared to us a kind of Paradise. The wind blew aU day from the south- west, and all day in the grove across the way the orioles sang to their nestlings. The butcher's wagon rattled merrily up to our gate every morning ; and if we had kept no other reckoning, we should have known it was Thursday by the grocer. We were living in the country with the conveniences and lux- aries of the city about us. The house was almos' new and in perfect repair ; and, better than all, the MRS. JOHNSON. 13 Kitclien had as yet given no signs of unrest in those volcanic, agencies which are constantly at work there, and which, with sudden explosion, make Hercula- neums and Pompeiis of so many smiling households. Breakfast, dinner, and tea came up with illusive regularity, and were all the most perfect of their kind ; and we laughed and feasted in our vain se- curity. We had out from the city to banquet with us the firiends we loved, and we were inexpressibly proud before them of the Help, who first wrought miracles of cookery in our honor, and then appeared in a clean white apron, and the glossiest black hair, to wait upon the table. She was young, and cer- tainly very pretty ; she was as gay as a lark, and was courted by a young man whose clothes would have been a credit, if they had not been a reproach, to our lowly basement. She joyfully assented to the idea of staying with us till she married. In fact, there was much that was extremely pleas- ant about the little place^when the warm weather came, and it was not wonderftJ to us that Jenny was willing to remain. It was very quiet; we called one another to the window if a large dog went by our door ; and whole days passed without the move- ment of any wheels but the butcher's upon our street, which flourished in ragweed and butter-cups and daisies, and in the autumn burned, like the borders of nearly all the streets in Charlesbridge, with the pallid azure name of the succoiy. The neighborhood was in all things a frontier between city and country. The horse-cars, the type of such 14 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. civilization — full of imposture, discomfort, and sub- lime possibility — as -we yet possess, went by the head of our street, and might, perhaps, be available to one skilled in calculating the movements of comets ; while two minutes' walk would take us into a wood so wild and thick that no roof was visible through the trees. We learned, like innocent pas- toral people of the golden age, to know the several voices of the cows pastured in the vacant lots, and, like engine-drivers of the iron age, to distinguish the diflFerent whistles of the locomotives passing on the neighboring railroad. The trains shook the house as they thimdered along, and at night were a kind of company, while by day we had the society of the innumerable birds. Now and then, also, the little ragged boys in charge of the cows — which, tied by long ropes to trees, forever wound themselves tight up against the trunks, and had to be unwound with great ado of hooting and hammering — cailie and peered lustftdly through the gate at our ripening pears. All round us carpenters were at work build- ing new houses ; but so far from troubling us, the ■•trokes of their hammers fell softly upon the sense, like one's heart-beats upon one's own consciousness in the lapse from all fear of pain imder the blessed charm of an anaesthetic. We played a little at gardening, of course, and planted tomatoes, which the chickens seemed to like, for they ate them up as fast as they ripened ; and we watched with pride the growth of our Lawton blackberries, which, after attaining the most stal- MES. JOHNSON. 15 ^rart proportions, were still as bitter as the scrub- biest of their savage brethren, and which, when by advice left on the vines for a week after they turned black, were silently gorged by secret and gluttonous flocks of robins and orioles. As for our grapes, the frost cut them off in the hour of their triuifiph. So, as I have hinted, we were not surprised that Jenny should be willing to remain with us, and were as little prepared for her desertion as for any other change of our moral state. But one day in Septem- ber she came to her nominal mistress with tears in her beautiful eyes and protestations of unexampled devotion upon her tongue, and said that she was afraid she must leave us. She liked the place, and she never had worked for any one that was more of a lady, but she had made up her mind to go into the city. AU this, so far, was quite in the manner of domestics who, in ghost stories, give warning to the occupants of haunted houses; and Jenny's mistress listened in suspense for the motive of her desertion, expecting to hear no less than that it was sometliing which walked up and down the stairs and dragged iron links after it, • or something that came and groaned at the front door,, like populace dissatisfied with a political candidate. But it was in fact noth- ing of this kind ; simply, there were no lamps upon our street, and Jenny, after spending Sunday even- ing with friends in East Charlesbridge, was always alarmed, on her return, in walking from the horse- rar to our door. The case was hopeless, and Jenny and our household parted with respect and regret. 16 SUBUKBAN SKETCHES. We had not before this thought it a grave disad- vantage that our street was unlighted. Our street was not drafned nor graded ; no municipal cart ever came to carry away our ashes ; there was not a water-butt within half a mile to save us from fire, nor more than the one thousandth part of a pohce- man to protect us from theft. Yet, as I paid a heavy tax, I somehow felt that we enjoyed the benefits of city government, and never looked upon Charles- bridge as in any way undesirable for residence. But when it became necessary to find help in Jenny's place, the frosty welcome given to application at the intelligence offices renewed a painful doubt awakened by her departure. To be sure, the heads of the offices were polite enough ; but when the young housekeeper had stated her case at the first to which she apphed, and the Intelligencer had called out to the invisible expectants in the adjoining room, "Anny wan wants to do giner'l housework in Charlsbrudge ? " there came from the maids invoked so loud, so fierce, so full a " No I " as shook the lady's heart with an indescribable shame and dread. The name that, with an innoceirt pride in its literary and historical associations, she had written at the heads of her letters, was suddenly become a matter of reproach to her ; and she was almost tempted to conceal thereafter that she lived in Charlesbridge, and to pretend that she dwelt upon some wretched little street in Boston. " You see," said the head of the ofiSce, " the gairls doesn't hke to live so far away from the city. Now if it was on'y in the Port ....'■ MRS. JOHNSON. 17 This pen is not graphic enough to give the remote reader an idea of the affront offered to an inhab- itant of Old Charlesbridge in these closing words. Neither am I of sufficiently tragic mood to report here all the sufferings undergone by an unhappy fam- ily in finding servants, or to tell how the winter was passed with miserable makeshifts. Alas! is it not the history of a thousand experiences ? Any one who looks upon this page could match it with a tale as full of heartbreak and disaster, while I conceive that, in hastening to speak of Mrs. Johnson, I ap- proach a subject of unique interest. The winter that ensued after Jenny's departure was the true sister of the bitter and shrewish spring of the same year. But indeed it is always with a secret shiver that one must think of winter in our regrettable cHmate. It is a terrible potency, robbing us of half our lives, and threatening or desolating the moiety left us with rheumatisms and catarrhs. There is a much vaster sum of enjoyment possible to man in the more generous latitudes ; and I have sometimes doubted whether even the energy charac- teristic of ours is altogether to be praised, seeing that it has its spring not so much in pure aspiration as in the instinct of self-preservation. Egyptian, Greek, Roman energy was an inner impulse ; but ours is too often the sting of cold, the spur of famine. We must endure our winter, but let us not be guilty of the hypocrisy of pretending that we like it. Let us caress it with no more vain compliments, but use it with something of its own rude and savage sincerity 2 18 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES. I say, our last Irish girl went with the last snow, •and on one of those midsummer-like days that some* times fall in early April to our yet bleak and desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some sable maid with crisped locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive train beside the desert, we shoidd make to do our general housework forever, through the right of lawful purchase. But we knew that this was impossible, and that, if we desired colored help, we must seek it at the intelligence office, which is in one of those streets chiefly inhabited by the orphaned children and grandchildren of slavery. To tell the truth these orphans do not seem to grieve much for their bereavement, but lead a life of joyous and rather indolent oblivion in their quarter of the city. They are often to be seen sauntering up and down the street by which the Charlesbridge cars arrive, — the young with a harmless swagger, and the old with the generic limp which our Autocrat has already noted as attending advanced years in their race. They seem the natural human interest of a street so largely devoted to old clothes ; and the thoughtful may see a felicity in their presence where the pawnbrokers' windows display the forfeited pledges of improvidence, and subtly remind us that we have yet to redeem a whole race, pawned in our needy and reckless national youth, and still held against us by the Uncle of Injustice, who is also tlie MBS. JOHNSON. 19 Father of Lies. How gayly are the young ladies of this race attired, as they trip up and down the side walks, and in and out through the pendent garments at the shop doors 1 They are the Hack pansies and marigolds and dark-blooded dahlias among woman- kind. They try to assume something of our colder race's demeanor, but even the passer on the horse- car can see that it is not native with them, and is better pleased when they forget us, and ungenteelly laugh in encountering friends, letting their white teeth glitter through the generous lips that open to their ears. In the streets branching upwards from this avenue, very little colored men and maids play with broken or enfeebled toys, or sport on the wooden pavements of the entrances to the inner courts. Now and then a colored soldier or sailor — looking strange in his uniform, even after the custom of several years — emerges from those passages ; or, more rarely, a black gentleman, stricken in years, and cased in shining broadcloth, walks solidly down the brick sidewalk, cane in hand, — a vision of serene self-complacency, and so plainly the expres- sion of virtuous public sentiment that the great col- ored louts, innocent enough till then in their idleness, are taken with a sudden sense of depravity, and loaf guiltily up against the house-walls. At the same moment, perhaps, a young damsel, amorously scuf- fling with an admirer through one of the low open windows, suspends the strife, and bids him, " Go along now, do ! " More rarely yet than the gentle- man described, one may see a whits girl among the 20 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. dark neighbors, whose frowzy head is uncovered, and whose sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, and who, though no doubt quite at home, looks as strange there as that pale anomaly which may sometimes be seen among a crew of blackbirds. An air not so much of decay as of unthrift, and yet hardly of unthrift, seems to prevail in the neigh- borhood, which has none of the aggressive and im- pudent squalor of an Irish quarter, and none of the surly wickedness of a low American street. A gay- ety not born of the things that bring its serious joy to the true New England heart — a ragged gayety, which comes of summer in the blood, and not in the pocket or the conscience, and which affects the coun- tenance and the whole demeanor, setting the feet to some inward music, and at times bursting into a line of song or a child-like and irresponsible laugh — gives tone to the visible life, and wakens a very friendly spirit in the passer, who somehow thinks there of a milder climate, and is half persuaded that the orange-peel on the sidewalks came from fruit grown in the soft atmosphere of those back courts. It was in this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs. Johnson ; and it was from a colored boarding-house there that she came out to Charlesbridge to look at us, bringing her daughter of twelve years with her. She was a matron of mature age and portly figure, with a complexion like coffee soothed with the rich- est cream ; and her manners were so full of a certain tranquillity and grace, that she charmed away all our Tin to ask for references. It was only her barbaric MBS. JOHNSON. 21 laughter and her lawless eye that betrayed ho'w slightly her New England bu'th and breeding cov ered her ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years of civilization that lay between hei race and ours. But in fact, she was doubly estranged by descent ; for, as we learned later, a sylvan wild- ness mixed with that of the desert in her veins : her grandfather was an Indian, and her ancestors on this side had probably sold their lands for the same value in trinkets that bought the original African pan* on the other side. The first day that Mrs. Johnson descended into our kitchen, she conjured from the malicious disorder in which it had been left by the flitting Irish kobold a dinner that revealed the inspirations of genius, and was quite different from a dinner of mere routine and laborious talent. Something original and au- thentic mingled with the accustomed flavors; and, though vague reminiscences of canal-boat travel and woodland camps arose from the relish of certain of the dishes, there was yet the assurance of such power in the preparation of the whole, that we knew her to be merely running over the chords of our appetite with prehminary savors, as a musician acquaints his touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano before breaking into brilliant and triumphant execution. Within a week she had mastered her instrument ; md thereafter there was no faltering in her perform Sinces, which she varied constantly, through inspira- tion or from suggestion. She was so quick to receivft aew ideas in her art, that, when the Boman statuary 22 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. who stayed a few weeks with us explained the mys- tery of various purely Latin dishes, she caught their principle at once ; and visions of the great white cathedral, the Coliseum, and the " dome of Brunel- leschi " floated before us in the exhalations of the Milanese risotto, Roman stufadino, and Florentine atraootto that smoked upon our board. But, after all, it was in puddings that Mrs. Johnson chiefly excelled. She was one of those cooks — rare as men of genius in literature — who love their own dishes ; and she had, in her personally child-like simplicity of taste, and the inherited appetites of her savage fore- fathers, a doininant passion for sweets. So h.v as we could learn, she subsisted principally upon puddings and tea. Through the same primitive instincts, liO doubt, she loved praise. She openly exulted in our artless flatteries of her skill ; she waited jealously at the head of the kitchen stairs to hear what was said of her work, especially if there were guests; and she was never too weary to attempt emprises ol cookery. "While engaged in these, she wore a species of sightly handkerchief like a turban upon her head, and about her person those mystical swathings in which old ladies of the African race delight. But she most pleasured our sense of beauty and moral fitness when, after the last pan was was.hed and the last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and, taking her stand at the kitchen door, laded the soft evening air with its pungent odors. If we surprised ter at these supreme moments, she took the pipe MRS. JOHNSON. 23 from her lips, and put it behind her, with a low mellow chuckle, and a look of half-defiant conscious- ness ; never guessing that none of her merits took us half so much as the cheerful vice which she only feigned to conceal. Some things she could not do so perfectly as cook- ing, because of her faihng eyesight; and we per- suaded her that spectacles would both become and befriend a lady of her years, and so bought her a pair of steel-bowed glasses. She wore them in some great emergencies at first, but had clearly no pride in them. Before long she laid them aside altogether, and they had passed from our thoughts, when one day we heard her mellow note of laughter and her daughter's harsher cackle outside our doory and, opening it, beheld Mrs. Johnson in gold-bowed spec- tacles of massive frame. We then learned that their purchase was in fulfillment of a vow made long ago, in the life-time of Mr. Johnson, that, if ever she wore glasses, they should be gold-bowed ; and I hope the manes of the dead were half as happy in these votive spectacles as the simple soul that ofiered them. She and her late partner were the parents of eleven children, some of whom were dead, and some of whom were wanderers in unknown parts. During his life-time she had kept a httle shop in her native town ; and it was only within a few years that ghe had gone into service. She cherished a natural aaughtiness of spirit, and resented control, although disposed to do all she could of her own motion. Being told to say when she wanted an afternoon, 24 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. she explained that when she wanted an afternoon she always took it without asking, but always planned so as not to discommode the ladies with whom she lived. These, she said, had numbered twenty-seven within three years, which made us doubt the success of her system in all cases, though she merely held out the fact as an assurance of her faith in the fii- ture, and a proof of the ease with which places were to be found. She contended, moreover, that a lady who had for thirty years had a house of her own, was in nowise bound to ask permission to receive visits from friends where she might be living, but that they ought freely to come and go like other guests. In this spirit she once invited her son-in- law. Professor Jones of Providence, to dine with her; and her defied mistress, on entering the dining- room, found the Professor at pudding and tea there, — an impressively respectable figure in black clothes, with a black face rendered yet more eflPective by a pair of green goggles. It appeared that this dark professor was a light of phrenology in Rhode Island, and that he was believed to have uncommon virtue in his science by reason of being blind as well as black. I am loath to confess that Mrs. Johnson had not a flattering opinion of the Caucasian race in all re- spects. In fact, she had very good philosophical and Scriptural reasons for looking upon us as an upstart oeople of new blood, who had come into their white- ness by no creditable or pleasant process. The late Mr. Johnson, who had died in the West Indies, MBS. JOHNSON. 25 whither he voyaged for his health in quality of cook tq)on a Down-East schooner, was a man of letters, and had written a book to show the superiority of the black over the white branches of the human family. In this he held that, as all islands have been at their discovery found peopled by blacks, we must needs believe that humanity was first created of that color. Mrs. Johnson could not show us her hus- band's work (a sole copy in the library of an Eng- lish gentleman at Port au Prince is not to be bought for money), but she often developed its arguments to the lady of the house ; and one day, with a great show of reluctance, and many protests that no per- sonal shght was meant, let fall the fact that Mr. Johnson believed the white race descended from Gehazi the leper, upon whom the leprosy of Naaman fell -when the latter returned by Divine favor to his original blackness. "And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow," said Mrs. John- son, quoting irrefutable Scripture. "Leprosy, lep- rosy," she added thoughtfully, — " nothing but lep- rosy bleached you out." It seems to me much in her praise that she did not exult in our taint and degradation, as some white philosophers used to do in the opposite idea that a part of the human family were cursed to lasting blackness and slavery in Ham and his children, but even told us of a remarkable approach to whiteness in many of her own offspring. In a kindred spirit of charity, no doubt, she refused ever to attend church with people of her elder and wholesomer 26 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. blood. Wlion she went to church, she said, she always went to a white church, though while with us I am bound to say she never went to any. She professed to read her Bible in her tedroom on Sun- days ; but we suspected, from certain sounds and odors which used to steal out of this sanctuary, that her piety more commonly found expression in dozing and smoking. I would not make a wanton jest here of Mrs. Johnson's anxiety to claim honor for the African color, while denying this color in many of her own family. It afforded a glimpse of the pain which all her people must endure, however proudly they hide it or light-heartedly forget it, from the despite and contumely to which they are guiltlessly bom ; and when I thought how irreparable was this disgrace and calamity of a black skin, and how irreparable it must be for ages yet, in this world where every other shame and all manner of wilfal guilt and wickedness may hope for covert and pardon, I had little heart to laugh. Indeed, it was so pathetic to hear this poor old soul talk of her dead and lost ones, and try, in spite of all Mr. Johnson's theories and her own arrogant generalizations, to establish their whiteness, that Ave must have been very cruel and silly people to turn her sacred fables even into matter of ques- tion. I have no doubt that her Antoinette Anastasia and her Thomas Jefferson Wilberforce — it is impos- sible to give a full idea of the splendor and scope of the baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson's family — have R,s light skins and as golden hair in heaven as her MKS. JOHNSON. 27 reverend matemox fancy painted for them in our world. There, certainly, they would not be subject to tanning, which had ruined the deHcate complexion, and had knotted into black woolly tangles the once wa,Yj blonde locks of our little maid-servant Naomi ; and I would fain believe that Toussaint Washington Johnson, who ran away to sea so many years ago, has found some fortunate zone where his hair and skin keep the same sunny and rosy tints they wore to his mother's eyes in infancy. But I have no means of knowing this, or of telling whether he was the prodigy of intellect that he was declared to be. Naomi could no more be taken in proof of the one assertion than of the other. When she came to us, it was agreed that she should go to school ; but she overruled her mother in this as in everything else, and never went. Except Simday-school lessons, she had no other instruction than that her mistress gave her in the evenings, when a heavy day's play and the natural uifluences of the hour conspired with original causes to render her powerless before words of one syllable. The first week of her service she was obedient and faithful to her duties ; but, relaxing in the at- mosphere of a house which seems to demoralize all menials, she shortly fell into disorderly ways of lying in wait for callers out of doors, and, when people rang, of rimning up the front steps, and letting them in from the outside. As the season expanded, and the fine weather became confirmed, she modified ?ven tills form of service, and spent her time in the 28 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES. fields, appearing at the house only when nature iniportunately craved molasses. She had a parrot- like quickness, so far as music was concerned, and learned from the Roman statuary to make the groves and half-finished houses resound, " Camicia rossa, Ove t' ascondi ? T' appella Italia, — Tu uon lespondi I " She taught the Garibaldi song, moreover, to all the neighboring children, so that I sometimes won- dered if our street were not about to march upon Rome in a body. In her untamable disobedience, Naomi alone be- trayed her sylvan blood, for she was in all other respects negro and not Indian. But it was of her aboriginal ancestry that Mrs. Johnson chiefly boasted, — when not engaged in argument to main- tain the superiority of the African race. She loved to descant upon it as the cause and explanation of her own arrogant habit of feeling ; and she seemed indeed to have inherited something of the Indian's hauteur along with the Ethiop's supple cunning and abundant amiabiHty. She gave many instances in. which her pride had met and overcome the insolence of employers, and the kindly old creature was by no means singular in her pride of being reputed proud. She could never have been a woman of strong logical faculties, but she had in some things a very surprising and awful astuteness. She seldom intro- liiced any purpose directly, but bore all about it. MRS. JOHNSON. 29 Mid then suddenly sprung it upon htl unprepared antagonist. At other times she obscurely hinted a reason, and left a conclusion to be inferred ; as when she warded oflF reproach for some delinquency by saying in a general way that she had Uved with ladies who used to come scolding into the kitchen after they had taken their bitters. " Quality ladies took their bitters regular," she added, to remove any sting of personality from her remark ; for, from many things she had let fall, we knew that she did not regard us as quality. On the contrary, she often tried to overbear us with the gentility of her former places ; and would tell the lady over whom she reigned, that she had lived with folks worth their three and four hundred thousand dollars, who never complained as she did of the ironing. Yet she had a sufficient regard for the literary occupations of the family, Mr. Johnson having been an author. She even professed to have herself written a book, which was still in manuscript, and preserved somewhere among her best clothes. It was well, on many accounts, to be in contact with a mind so original and suggestive as Mrs. John- son's. We loved to trace its intricate yet often transparent operations, and were perhaps too fond of erplaining its peculiarities by facts of ancestry, — of finding hints of the Powwow or the Grand Cus- tom in each grotesque development. We were con- scious of something warmer ■ in this old soul than in ourselves, and something wilder, and we chose to hink it the tropic and the untracked forest. She 30 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. had scarcely any being apart from her affection ; she had no morality, but was good because she neither hated nor envied ; and she might have been a saint far more easily than tar more civilized people. There was that also in her sinuous yet malleable nature, so ftiU of guile and so full of goodness, that reminded us pleasantly of lowly folk in elder lands, where relaxing oppressions have lifted the restraints of fear between master and servant, without disturb- ing the familiarity of their relation. She advised freely with us upon aU household matters, and took a motherly interest in whatever concerned us. She could be flattered or caressed into almost any service, but no threat or command could move her. When she erred, she never acknowledged her wrong in words, but handsomely expressed her regrets in a pudding, or sent up her apologies in a favorite dish secretly prepared. We grew so well used to this form of exculpation, that, whenever Mrs. Johnson took an afternoon at an inconvenient season, we knew that for a week afterwards we should be feasted .like princes. She owned frankly that she loved us, that she never had done half so much for people before, and that she never had been nearly so well suited in any other place ; and for a brief and happy time we thought that we never should part. One day, however, our dividing destiny appeared in the basement, and was presented to us as Hip- polyto Thucydides, the son of Mrs. Johnson, who had just arrived on a visit to his mother from the State Df New Hampshire. He was a heavy and loutish MRS. JOHNSON. 81 youth, standing upon the borders of boyhood, and looking forward to the future with a vacant and Ust- less eye. I mean that this was his figurative atti- tude ; his actual manner, as he lolled upon a chair beside the kitchen window, was so eccentric, that we felt a little uncertain how to regard him, and Mrs. Johnson openly described him as peculiar. He was so deeply tanned by the fervid suns of the New Hampshire winter, and his hair had so far suffered from the example of the sheep lately under hia charge, that he could not be classed by any stretch of compassion with the blonde and straight-haired members of Mrs. Johnson's family. He remained with us all the first day until late in the afternoon, when his mother took him out to get him a boarding-house. Then he departed in the van of her and Naomi, pausing at the gate to collect his spirits, and, after he had sufiiciently animated himself by clapping his palms together, starting off down the street at a hand-gallop, to the manifest terror of the cows in the pastures, and the confiision of the less demonstrative people of our household. Other characteristic traits appeared in Hippolyto rhucydides within no very long period of time, and he ran away from his lodgings so often during the summer that he might be said to board round among the outlying corn-fields and turnip-patches of Charles- bridge. As a check upon this habit, Mrs. Johnson seemed to have invited him to spend his whole time in our basement ; for whenever we went below we ound him there, balanced — perhaps in homage to 52 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES. as, and perhaps as a token of extreme sensibility in himself — upon the low window-sill, the bottoms ol his boots touching the floor inside, and his face buried in the grass without. We could formulate no very tenable objection to a II this, and yet the presence of Thucydides in our kitchen unaccountably oppressed our imaginations. ^A^e beheld him all over the house, a monstrous iidolon, balanced upon every window-sill ; and he certainly attracted unpleasant notice to our place, no less by his fiirtive and hang-dog manner of arrival than by the bold displays with which he celebrated his departures. We hinted this to Mrs. Johnson, but she could not enter into our feeling. Indeed, all the wild poetry of her maternal and primitive nature seemed to cast itself about this hapless boy ; and if we had listened to her we should have believed there was no one so agreeable in society, or so quick-witted in affairs, as HippolytOj, when he chose. She used to rehearse us long epics concerning his industry, his courage, and his talent ; and she put fine speeches in his mouth with no more regard to the truth than if she had been a historian, and not a poet. Perhaps she believed that he really said and did the things she attributed to him : it is the destiny of those who repeatedly tell great things either of themselves or others ; and I think we may readily forgive the illu- sion to her zeal and fondness. In fact, she was not a wise woman, and she spoiled her children as if she had been a rich one. At last, when we said positively that Thucydides MRS. JOHNSON. 38 should come to us no more, and then quahfied the prohibition by allowing him to come eVery Sunday, she answered that she never would hurt the child's feelings by telling him not to come where his mother was ; that people who did not love her children did not love her; and that, if Hippy went, she went. We thought it a master-stroke of firmness to rejoin that Hippolyto must go in any event ; but I am bound to own that he did not go, and that his mother stayed, and so fed us with every cunning propitiatory dainty, that we must have been Pagans to renew our threat. In fact, we begged Mrs. Johnson to go into the country with us, and she, after long reluc- tation on Hippy's account, consented, agreeing to send him away to friends during her absence. We made every preparation, and on the eve of our departure Mrs. Johnson went into the city to engage her son's passage to Bangor, while we awaited her return in untroubled security. But she did not appear till midnight, and then re- sponded with but a sad " Well, sail ! " to the cheer- fiil " Well, Mrs. Johnson 1 " that greeted her. " All right, Mrs. Johnson ? " Mrs. Johnson made a strange noise, half chuckle and half death-rattle, in her throat. "All wrong, sah. Hippy's off again; and I've been all over the city after him." " Then you can't go with us in the morning ? " " How can I, sah ? " Mrs. Johnson went sadly out of the room. Then 3 84 SUBUEBAN SKETCHES. she came back to the door again, and, opening it, uttered, for the first time in our service, words of apology and regret : " I hope I ha'n't put you out any, I wanted to go with you, but I ought to knowed I couldn't. All is, I loved you too much." DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. Vagabonds the world ■would no doubt call many of my doorstep acquaintance, and I do not attempt to defend them altogether against the world, which paints but black and white and in general terms. Yet I would fain veil what is only half-truth under another name, for I know that the service of their Gay Science is not one of such disgraceful ease as we associate with ideas of vagrancy, though I must own that they lead the .life they do because they love it. They always protest that nothing but their ignorance of our tongue prevents them from practic- ing some mechanical trade. " What work could be harder," they ask, " than carrying this organ about all day ? " but whUe I answer with honesty that nothing can be more irksome, I feel that they only pretend a disgust with it, and that they really like organ-grinding, if for no other reason than that they are the children of the summer, and it takes them into the beloved open weather. One of my friends, at least, who in the warmer months is to all appear- ance a blithesome troubadour, jving " A meny life in sun and shade," is a coal-heaver in winter ; and though the more aonorable and useful occupation is doubtless open to 36 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. aim the whole year round, yet he does not devote himself to it, hut prefers with the expanding spring to lay aside his grimy basket, and, shouldering his organ, to quit the dismal wharves and carts and cel- lars, and to wander forth into the suhurbs, with his lazy, soft-eyed boy at his heels, who does nothing with his tambourine but take up a collection, a^ad who, meeting me the other day in a chance passage of Ferry Street, knew me, and gave me so much of liis father's personal history. It was winter even there in Ferry Street, in which so many Italians live that one might think to find it under a softer sky and in a gentler air, and which I ha.d always figured in a wide unlikeness to all other streets in Boston, — with houses stuccoed outside, and with gratijigs at their ground-floor windows ; with mouldering archways between the buildings, and at the corners feeble lamps glimmering before pictures of the Madonna; with weather-beaten shutters flapping overhead, and many balconies from which hung the linen swathings of young infants, and love-making maidens fiirtively lured the velvet- jacketed, leisurely youth below : a place haunted by windy voices of blessing and cursing, with the perpetual clack of wooden-heeled shoes upon the stones, and what perfume from the blossom of vines and almond-trees, mingling with less delicate smells, the travelled reader pleases to imagine. I do not say that I found Ferry Street actually different from this vision in most respects ; but as for the vines and almond-trees, they were not in bloom at the momen DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 37 of my encounter with the little tambourine-boy. As we stood and talked, the snow fell as heavily and thickly around us as elsewhere in Boston. With a vague pain, — the envy of a race toward another bom to a happier clime, — I heard from him that his whole family was going back to Italy in a month. The father had at last got together money enough, and the mother, who had long been an invalid, must be taken home ; and, so far as I know, the population of Ferry Street exists but in the hope of a return, soon or late, to the native or the ancestral land. More than one of my doorstep acquaintance, in fact, seemed to have no other stock in trade than this fond desire, and to thrive with it in our sympa- thetic community. It is scarcely possible but the reader has met the widow of Giovanni Oascamatto, a Vesuvian lunatic who has long set Sre to their home on the slopes of the volcano, and perished in the flames. She was our first Italian acquaintance in Charlesbridge, presenting herself with a little subscription-book which she sent in for inspection, with a printed certificate to the facts of her history signed with the somewhat conventionally Saxon names of WUHam Tompkins and John Johnson. These gentlemen set forth, in terms vaguer than can be reproduced, that her object in coming to America was to get money to go back to Italy ; and the whole document had so fictitious an air that it made us doubt even the nationality of the bearer ; but we were put to shame by the decent joy she manifested n an Itahan salutation. There was no longer a 38 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. question of imposture in anybody's mind ; we gladly paid tribute to her poetic fiction, and she thanked ua with a tranquil courtesy that placed the obligation where it belonged. As she turned to go with many good wishes, we pressed her to have some dinner, but she answered with a compliment insurpassably flattering, she had just dined — in another palace. The truth is, there is not a single palace on Benicia Street, and our Uttle box of pine and paper would hardly have passed for a palace on the stage, where these things are often contrived with great simpKc- ity ; but as we had made a little Italy together, she touched it with the exquisite politeness of her race, and it became for the instant a lordly mansion, stand- ing on the Chiaja, or the Via Nuovissima, or the Canalazzo. I say this woman seemed glad to be greeted in Italian, but not, so far as I could see, surprised ; and altogether the most amazing thing about my doorstep acquaintance of her nation is, that they are never sm-prised to be spoken to in their own tongue, or, if they are, never show it. A chestnut-roaster, who has sold me twice the chestnuts the same money would have bought of him in English, has not other- wise recognized the fact that Tuscan is not the dia- lect of Charlesbridge, and the mortifying nonchalance with which my advances have always been received has long since persuaded me that to the grinder at the gate it is not remarkable that a man should open the door of his wooden house on Benicia Street, and welcome him in his native language. After the first DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 89 shock of this indifference is past, it is not to be ques- tioned but it flatters with an illusion, "which a stare of amazement would forbid, reducing the encounter to a vulgar reality at once, and I could almost be- heve it in those wily and amiable folk to intend the sweeter effect of their unconcern, which tacitly im- plies that there is no other tongue in the world buC Itahan, and which makes all the earth and air Ital ian for the time. Nothing else could have been th* purpose of that image-dealer whom I saw on a sum- mer's day lying at the foot of one of our meeting- houses, and doing his best to make it a cathedral, and really giving a sentiment of mediaeval art to the noble sculptures of the facade which the carpenters had just nailed up, freshly painted and newly re- paired. This poet was stretched upon his back, eating, in that convenient posture, his dinner out of an earthen pot, plucking the viand from it, whatever it was, with his thumb and fore-finger, and dropping it piecemeal into his mouth. When the passer asked him " Where are you from ? " he held a morsel in air long enough to answer " Da Lucca, signore," and then let it fall into hia throat, and sank deeper into a reverie in which that crude accent even must have sounded like a gossip's or a kinsman's voice, but never otherwise moved muscle, nor looked to see who passed or lingered. There could have been jttle else in his circumstances to remind him of home, and if he was really in the sort of day-dream ^.ttributed to him, he was wise not to look about him. I have not myself been in Lucca, but I conceive that 40 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. its piazza is not like our square, with a pump and horse-trough in the midst ; but that it has probably a fountain and statuary, though not possibly so mag- nificent an elm towering above the bronze or marble groups as spreads its boughs of benison over our pump and the horse-car switchman, loitering near it to set the switch for the arriving cars, or lift the brimming buckets to the smoking nostrils of the horses, while out from the stable comes clanging and banging with a fresh team that famous African who has turned white, or, if he is off duty, one of his brethren who has not yet begun to turn. Figure, besides, an expressman watering his horse at the trough, a provision-cart backed up against the curb in front of one of the stores, various people looking from the car-office windows, and a conductor appear- ing at the door long enough to caU out, " Ready for Boston! " — and you have a scene of such gayety as Lucca could never have witnessed in her piazza at high noon on a summer's day. Even our Oampo Santo, if the Lucchese had cared to look round the comer of the meeting-house at its moss-grown head stones, could have had little to remind him of home, though it has antiquity and a proper quaintness. But not for him, not for them of his clime and faith, is the pathos of those simple memorial slates with their winged skulls, changing upon many later stones, as if by the softening of creeds and customs, to cherub's heads, — not for him is the palig I feel because of those who died, in our country's youth, exiles or exiles* children, heirs of the wilderness and DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 41 toil aud hardship. Could they rise from their restful beds, and look on this wandering Italian with his plaster statuettes of Apollo, and Canovan dancers and deities, they would hold his wares little better than Romish saints and idolatries, and would scarcely have the sentimental interest in him felt by the mod- em citizen of Charlesbridge ; but I think that even they must have respected that Lombard scissors- grinder who used to come to us, and put an edge to aU the cutlery in the house. He has since gone back to Milan, whence he came eighteen years ago, and whither he has returned, — as he told me one acute day in the fall, when aU the winter hinted itself, and the painted leaves shuddered earthward in the grove across the way, — to enjoy a Httle climate before he died (per goder un po' di clima prima di morire) . Our climate was the only thing he had against us ; in every other respect he was a New-Englander, even to the early stages of con- sumption. He told me the story of his whole life, and of how in his adventurous youth he had lefl Milan and sojourned some years in Naples, vainly seeking his fortune there. Afterwards he went to Greece, and set up his ancestral business of green- grocer in Athens, faring there no better, but rather worse than in Naples, because of the deeper wicked- ness of the Athenians, who cheated him right and left, and whose laws gave him no redress. The Neapolitans were bad enough, he said, making a wry face, but the Greeks ! — and he spat the Greeks out