Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/749

1858.] in one of them queer boats of his, and he was the solitariest creetur in his goin's about (except when he could get that schoolmistress to trail round with him) that ever you see in your life. He used to say that usin' two eyes and two legs at once, and keepin' one tongue a-goin', too, was too sharp practice for him; so he had a way of dodgin' round all sorts of odd streets, I've heerd say, where he wouldn't meet people that would stick to him.

It didn't take much to please him. Sometimes it would be a big book he'd lug home, and sometimes it would be a mikerscope, and sometimes it would be a dreadful old-lookin' fiddle that he'd picked up somewhere, and kept a-screechin' on, sayin' all the while that it was jest as smooth as a flute. Then ag'in I'd hear him laughin' out all alone, and I'd go up and find him readin' some verses that he'd been makin'. But jest as like as not I'd go in another time, and find him cryin',—but he'd wipe his eyes and try not to show it, —and it was all nothin' but some more verses he'd been a-writin'. I've heerd him say that it was put down in one of them ancient books, that a man must cry, himself, if he wants to make other folks cry; but, says he, you can't make 'em neither laugh nor cry, if you don't try on them feelin's yourself before you send your work to the customers.

He was a temperate man, and always encouraged temperance by drinkin' jest what he was a mind to, and that was generally water. You couldn't scare him with names, though. I remember a young minister that's go'n' to be, that boards at my house, askin' once what was the safest strong drink for them that had to take somethin' for the stomach's sake and thine awful infirmities. Aqua fortis, says he, —because you know that'll eat your insides out, if you get it too strong, and so you always mind how much you take. Next to that, says he, rum's the safest for a wise man, and small beer for a fool.

I never mistrusted anything about him and that schoolmistress till I heerd they was keepin' company and was go'n' to be merried. But I might have knowed it well enough by his smartin' himself up the way he did, and partin' the hair on the back of his head, and gettin' a blue coat with brass buttons, and wearin' them dreadful tight little French boots that used to stand outside his door to be blacked, and stickin' round schoolma'am, and follerin' of her with his eyes; but then he was always fond of ladies, and used to sing with my daughter, and wrote his name out in a blank book she keeps,—them that has daughters of their own will keep their eyes on 'em,—and I've often heerd him say he was fond of music and picters,—and she worked a beautiful pattern for a chair of his once, that he seemed to set a good deal by; but I ha'n't no fault to find, and there is them that my daughter likes and them that likes her.

As to schoolma'am, I ha'n't a word to say that a'n't favorable, and don't harbor no unkind feelin' to her, and never knowed them that did. When she first come to board at my house, I hadn't any idee she'd live long. She was all dressed in black; and her face looked so delicate, I expected before six months was over to see a plate of glass over it, and a Bible and a bunch of flowers layin' on the lid of thewell, I don't like to talk about it; for when she first come, and said her mother was dead, and she was alone in the world, except one sister out West, and unlocked her trunk and showed me her things, and took out her little purse and showed me her money, and said that was all the property she had in the world but her courage and her education, and would I take her and keep her till she could get some scholars,—I couldn't say not one word, but jest went up to her and kissed her and bu'st out a-cryin' so as I never cried since I buried the last of my five children that lays in the buryin'-ground with their father, and a place for one more grown person betwixt him and the shortest of them five graves, where my baby is waitin' for its mother.

[The landlady stopped here and shed