The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III | Page 3

though seldom or
never in suburban places, where the field may be supposed too
restricted for their operations--persons who have no perceptible means
of subsistence, and manage to live royally on nothing a year. They hold
no government bonds, they possess no real estate (our neighbors did
own their house), they toil not, neither do they spin; yet they reap all
the numerous soft advantages that usually result from honest toil and
skilful spinning. How do they do it? But this is a digression, and I am
quite of the opinion of the old lady in "David Copperfield," who says,
"Let us have no meandering!"
Though my wife had declined to risk a ceremonious call on our
neighbors as a family, I saw no reason why I should not speak to the

husband as an individual, when I happened to encounter him by the
wayside. I made several approaches to do so, when it occurred to my
penetration that my neighbor had the air of trying to avoid me. I
resolved to put the suspicion to the test, and one forenoon, when he was
sauntering along on the opposite side of the road, in the vicinity of
Fisher's sawmill, I deliberately crossed over to address him. The
brusque manner in which he hurried away was not to be misunderstood.
Of course I was not going to force myself upon him.
It was at this time that I began to formulate uncharitable suppositions
touching our neighbors, and would have been as well pleased if some
of my choicest fruit-trees had not overhung their wall. I determined to
keep my eyes open later in the season, when the fruit should be ripe to
pluck. In some folks, a sense of the delicate shades of difference
between meum and tuum does not seem to be very strongly developed
in the Moon of Cherries, to use the old Indian phrase.
I was sufficiently magnanimous not to impart any of these sinister
impressions to the families with whom we were on visiting terms; for I
despise a gossip. I would say nothing against the persons up the road
until I had something definite to say. My interest in them was--well, not
exactly extinguished, but burning low. I met the gentleman at intervals,
and passed him without recognition; at rarer intervals I saw the lady.
After a while I not only missed my occasional glimpses of her pretty,
slim figure, always draped in some soft black stuff with a bit of scarlet
at the throat, but I inferred that she did not go about the house singing
in her light-hearted manner, as formerly. What had happened? Had the
honeymoon suffered eclipse already? Was she ill? I fancied she was ill,
and that I detected a certain anxiety in the husband, who spent the
mornings digging solitarily in the garden, and seemed to have
relinquished those long jaunts to the brow of Blue Hill, where there is a
superb view of all Norfolk County combined with sundry venerable
rattlesnakes with twelve rattles.
As the days went by it became certain that the lady was confined to the
house, perhaps seriously ill, possibly a confirmed invalid. Whether she
was attended by a physician from Canton or from Milton, I was unable

to say; but neither the gig with the large white allopathic horse, nor the
gig with the homoeopathic sorrel mare, was ever seen hitched at the
gate during the day. If a physician had charge of the case, he visited his
patient only at night. All this moved my sympathy, and I reproached
myself with having had hard thoughts of our neighbors. Trouble had
come to them early. I would have liked to offer them such small,
friendly services as lay in my power; but the memory of the repulse I
had sustained still rankled in me. So I hesitated.
One morning my two boys burst into the library with their eyes
sparkling.
"You know the old elm down the road?" cried one.
"Yes."
"The elm with the hang-bird's nest?" shrieked the other.
"Yes, yes!"
"Well, we both just climbed up, and there's three young ones in it!"
Then I smiled to think that our new neighbors had got such a promising
little family.

MY FIRST VISIT TO PORTLAND
BY MAJOR JACK DOWNING
In the fall of the year 1829, I took it into my head I'd go to Portland. I
had heard a good deal about Portland, what a fine place it was, and how
the folks got rich there proper fast; and that fall there was a couple of
new papers come up to our place from there, called the "Portland
Courier" and "Family Reader," and they told a good many queer kind
of things about Portland, and one thing and another; and all at once