Suburban Sketches | Page 8

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 Hippolyto Thucydides, the son of Mrs. Johnson,
who had just arrived on a visit to his mother from the State of New
Hampshire. He was a heavy and loutish youth, standing upon the
borders of boyhood, and looking forward to the future with a vacant
and listless eye. I mean that this was his figurative attitude; 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 his 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 sufficiently 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 confusion of the less
demonstrative people of our household. Other characteristic traits
appeared in Hippolyto Thucydides 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 Charlesbridge. 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 found him there,

balanced--perhaps in homage to us, and perhaps as a token of extreme
sensibility in himself--upon the low window-sill, the bottoms of his
boots touching the floor inside, and his face buried in the grass without.
We could formulate no very tenable objection to all this, and yet the
presence of Thucydides in our kitchen unaccountably oppressed our
imaginations. We beheld him all over the house, a monstrous eidolon,
balanced upon every window-sill; and he certainly attracted unpleasant
notice to our place, no less by his furtive 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 Hippolyto, 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 illusion
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 should come to us no
more, and then qualified 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
reluctation on Hippy's account, consented, agreeing to send him away