The Caxtons | Page 4

offer to my poor friend's orphan."
"Mr. Caxton, I honor you," said Squills, emphatically, jumping up, and

spilling half a tumblerful of scalding punch over my father's legs. "You
have a heart, sir; and I understand why your wife loves you. You seem
a cold man, but you have tears in your eyes at this moment."
"I dare say I have," said my father, rubbing his shins; "it was boiling!"
"And your son will be a comfort to you both," said Mr. Squills,
reseating himself, and, in his friendly emotion, wholly abstracted from
all consciousness of the suffering he had inflicted; "he will be a dove of
peace to your ark."
"I don't doubt it," said my father, ruefully; "only those doves, when
they are small, are a very noisy sort of birds--non talium avium cantos
somnum reducent. However, it might have been worse. Leda had
twins."
"So had Mrs. Barnabas last week," rejoined the accoucheur. "Who
knows what may be in store for you yet? Here's a health to Master
Caxton, and lots of brothers and sisters to him."
"Brothers and sisters! I am sure Mrs. Caxton will never think of such a
thing, sir," said my father, almost indignantly; "she's much too good a
wife to behave so. Once in a way it is all very well; but twice--and as it
is, not a paper in its place, nor a pen mended the last three days: I, too,
who can only write cuspide duriuscula,--and the baker coming twice to
me for his bill, too! The Ilithyiae, are troublesome deities, Mr. Squills."
"Who are the Ilithyiae?" asked the accoucheur.
"You ought to know," answered my father, smiling,--"the female
daemons who presided over the Neogilos, or New-born. They take the
name from Juno. See Homer, Book XI. By the by, will my Neogilos be
brought up like Hector, or Astyanax--videlicet, nourished by its mother,
or by a nurse?"
"Which do you prefer, Mr. Caxton?" asked Mr. Squills, breaking the
sugar in his tumbler. "In this I always deem it my duty to consult the
wishes of the gentleman."

"A nurse by all means, then," said my father. "And let her carry him
upo kolpo, next to her bosom. I know all that has been said about
mothers nursing their own infants, Mr. Squills; but poor Kitty is so
sensitive that I think a stout, healthy peasant woman will be the best for
the boy's future nerves, and his mother's nerves, present and future too.
Heigh-ho! I shall miss the dear woman very much. When will she be up,
Mr. Squills?"
"Oh, in less than a fortnight!"
"And then the Neogilos shall go to school,--upo kolpo,--the nurse with
him, and all will be right again," said my father, with a look of sly,
mysterious humor which was peculiar to him.
"School! when he's just born?"
"Can't begin too soon," said my father, positively; "that's Helvetius'
opinion, and it is mine too!"

CHAPTER III.
That I was a very wonderful child, I take for granted; but nevertheless it
was not of my own knowledge that I came into possession of the
circumstances set down in my former chapters. But my father's conduct
on the occasion of my birth made a notable impression upon all who
witnessed it; and Mr. Squills and Mrs. Primmins have related the facts
to me sufficiently often to make me as well acquainted with them as
those worthy witnesses themselves. I fancy I see my father before me,
in his dark-gray dressing-gown, and with his odd, half-sly, half-
innocent twitch of the mouth, and peculiar puzzling look, from two
quiet, abstracted, indolently handsome eyes, at the moment he agreed
with Helvetius on the propriety of sending me to school as soon as I
was born. Nobody knew exactly what to make of my father,--his wife
excepted. The people of Abdera sent for Hippocrates to cure the
supposed insanity of Democritus, "who at that time," saith Hippocrates,
dryly, "was seriously engaged in philosophy." That same people of

Abdera would certainly have found very alarming symptoms of
madness in my poor father; for, like Democritus, "he esteemed as
nothing the things, great or small, in which the rest of the world were
employed." Accordingly, some set him down as a sage, some as a fool.
The neighboring clergy respected him as a scholar, "breathing
libraries;" the ladies despised him as an absent pedant who had no more
gallantry than a stock or a stone. The poor loved him for his charities,
but laughed at him as a weak sort of man, easily taken in. Yet the
squires and farmers found that, in their own matters of rural business,
he had always a fund of curious information to impart; and whoever,
young or old, gentle or simple, learned or ignorant, asked his advice,