Suburban Sketches | Page 9

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 responded with but a sad
"Well, sah!" to the cheerful "Well, Mrs. Johnson!" 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 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
practicing some mechanical trade. "What work could be harder," they
ask, "than carrying this organ about all day?" but while 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 appearance a blithesome troubadour, living
"A merry life in sun and shade,"
as a coal-heaver in winter; and though this more honorable and useful
occupation is doubtless open to him the whole year round, yet he does
not devote himself to it, but prefers with the expanding spring to lay
aside his grimy basket, and, shouldering his organ, to quit the dismal
wharves and carts and cellars, and to wander forth into the suburbs,
with his lazy, soft-eyed boy at his heels, who does nothing with his

tambourine but take up a collection, and who, meeting me the other day
in a chance passage of Ferry Street, knew me, and gave me so much of
his 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 had always figured in a wide unlikeness to all other streets
in Boston,--with houses stuccoed outside, and with gratings 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 furtively 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 moment 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 born 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
sympathetic community. It is scarcely possible but the reader has met
the widow of Giovanni Cascamatto, a Vesuvian lunatic who has