It was on a morning of the lovely New England May that we left the
horse-car and, spreading our umbrellas, walked down the street to our
new home in Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain so finely
blent by the influences of this fortunate climate that no flake knew
itself from its sister drop, or could be better identified by the
people against whom they beat in unison. A vernal gale from the east
fanned our cheeks and pierced our marrow and chilled our blood, while
the raw, cold green of the adventurous grass on the borders of the
sopping sidewalks gave, as it peered through its veil of melting snow
and freezing rain, a peculiar cheerfulness to the landscape. Here and
there in the vacant lots abandoned hoopskirts defied decay; and near
the half-finished wooden houses empty mortar-beds and bits of lath
and slate, strewn over the scarred and mutilated ground, added their
interest to the scene....
This heavenly weather, which the Pilgrim Fathers, with the idea of
turning their thoughts effectually from earthly pleasures, came so
far to discover, continued with slight amelioration throughout the
month of May and far into June; and it was a matter of constant
amazement with one who had known less austere climates, to behold how
vegetable life struggled with the hostile skies, and, in an
atmosphere as chill and damp as that of a cellar, shot forth the buds
and blossoms upon the pear trees, called out the sour Puritan courage
of the currant-bushes, taught a reckless native grapevine to wander
and wanton over the southern side of the fence, and decked the banks
with violets as fearless and as fragile as New England girls, so that
about the end of June, when the heavens relented and the sun blazed
out at last, there was little for him to do but to redden and darken
the daring fruits that had attained almost their full growth without
his countenance.
Then, indeed, Charlesbridge appeared to us a kind of paradise. The
wind blew all day from the southwest, and all day in the grove across
the way the orioles sang to their nestlings.... The house was almost
new and in perfect repair; and, better than all, the kitchen had as
yet given no signs of unrest in those volcanic agencies which are
constantly at work there, and which, with sudden explosions, make
Herculaneums and Pompeiis of so many smiling households. Breakfast,
dinner and tea came up with illusive regularity, and were all the
most perfect of their kind; and we laughed and feasted in our vain
security. We had out from the city to banquet with us the friends we
loved, and we were inexpressibly proud before them of the help who
first wrought miracles of cookery in our honor, and then appeared in
a clean white apron and the glossiest black hair to wait upon the
table. She was young and certainly very pretty; she was as gay as a
lark, and was courted by a young man whose clothes would have been a
credit, if they had not been a reproach, to our lowly basement. She
joyfully assented to the idea of staying with us till she married.
In fact, there was much that was extremely pleasant about the little
place when the warm weather came, and it was not wonderful to us that
Jenny was willing to remain. It was very quiet; we called one another
to the window if a large dog went by our door; and whole days passed
without the movement of any wheels but the butcher's upon our street,
which flourished in ragweed and buttercups and daisies, and in the
autumn burned, like the borders of nearly all the streets in
Charlesbridge, with the pallid azure flame of the succory. The
neighborhood was in all things a frontier between city and country.
The horse-cars, the type of such civilization--full of imposture,
discomfort, and sublime possibility--as we yet possess, went by the
head of our street, and might, perhaps, be available to one skilled
in calculating the movements of comets; while two minutes' walk would
take us into a wood so wild and thick that no roof was visible
through the trees. We learned, like innocent pastoral people of the
golden age, to know the several voices of the cows pastured in the
vacant lot, and, like engine-drivers of the iron-age, to distinguish
the different whistles of the locomotives passing on the neighboring
railroad. . . .
We played a little at gardening, of course, and planted tomatoes,
which the chickens seemed to like, for they ate them up as fast as
they ripened; and we watched with pride the growth of our Lawton
blackberries, which, after attaining the most stalwart proportions,
were still as bitter as the scrubbiest of their savage brethren, and
which, when by advice left on the vines for a week after they turned
black, were silently gorged by secret and gluttonous flocks of robins
and orioles. As for our grapes, the frost cut them off in the hour of
their triumph.
So, as I have hinted, we were not surprised that Jenny should be
willing to remain with us, and were as little prepared for her
desertion as for any other change of our mortal state. But one day in
September she came to her nominal mistress with tears in her
beautiful eyes and protestations of unexampled devotion upon her
tongue, and said that she was afraid she must leave us. She liked the
place, and she never had worked for anyone that was more of a lady,
but she had made up her mind to go into the city. All this, so far,
was quite in the manner of domestics who, in ghost stories, give
warning to the occupants of haunted houses; and Jenny's mistress
listened in suspense for the motive of her desertion, expecting to
hear no less than that it was something which walked up and down the
stairs and dragged iron links after it, or something that came and
groaned at the front door, like populace dissatisfied with a
political candidate. But it was in fact nothing of this kind; simply,
there were no lamps upon our street, and Jenny, after spending Sunday
evenings with friends in East Charlesbridge, was always alarmed on
her return in walking from the horse-car to our door. The case was
hopeless, and Jenny and our household parted with respect and regret.
We had not before this thought it a grave disadvantage that our
street was unlighted. Our street was not drained nor graded; no
municipal cart ever came to carry away our ashes; there was not a
water-butt within half a mile to save us from fire, nor more than the
one-thousandth part of a policeman to protect us from theft. Yet, as
I paid a heavy tax, I somehow felt that we enjoyed the benefits of
city government, and never looked upon Charlesbridge as in any way
undesirable for residence. But when it became necessary to find help
in Jenny's place, the frosty welcome given to application at the
intelligence offices renewed a painful doubt awakened by her
departure. To be sure, the heads of the offices were polite enough;
but when the young housekeeper had stated her case at the first to
which she applied, and the Intelligencer had called out to the
invisible expectants in the adjoining room, "Anny wan wants to do
giner'l housewark in Charlsbrudge?" there came from the maids invoked
so loud, so fierce, so full a "No!" as shook the lady's heart with an
indescribable shame and dread. The name that, with an innocent pride
in its literary and historical associations, she had written at the
heads of her letters, was suddenly become a matter of reproach to
her; and she was almost tempted to conceal thereafter that she lived
in Charlesbridge, and to pretend that she dwelt upon some wretched
little street in Boston. "You see," said the head of the office, "the
gairls doesn't like to live so far away from the city. Now, if it was
on'y in the Port." ...
This pen is not graphic enough to give the remote reader an idea of
the affront offered to an inhabitant of Old Charlesbridge in these
closing words. Neither am I of sufficiently tragic mood to report
here all the sufferings undergone by an unhappy family in finding
servants, or to tell how the winter was passed with miserable
makeshifts. Alas! is it not the history of a thousand experiences?
Anyone who looks upon this page could match it with a tale as full of
heartbreak and disaster, while I conceive that, in hastening to speak
of Mrs. Johnson, I approach a subject of unique interest. ...
I say our last Irish girl went with the last snow, and on one of
those midsummerlike days that sometimes fall in early April to our
yet bleak and desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden
joys. A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we
could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen
gauds, and traffic them for some sable maid with crisp locks, whom,
uncoffling from the captive train beside the desert, we should make
to do our general housework forever, through the right of lawful
purchase. But we knew that this was impossible, and that if we
desired colored help we must seek it at the intelligence office,
which is in one of those streets chiefly inhabited by the orphaned
children and grandchildren of slavery. To tell the truth, these
orphans do not seem to grieve much for their bereavement, but lead a
life of joyous and rather indolent oblivion in their quarter of the
city. They are often to be seen sauntering up and down the street by
which the Oharlesbridge cars arrive--the young with a harmless
swagger and the old with the generic limp which our Autocrat has
already noted as attending advanced years in their race.... How gaily
are the young ladies of this race attired, as they trip up and down
the sidewalks, and in and out through the pendant garments at the
shop doors! They are the black pansies and marigolds, and dark-
blooded dahlias among womankind. They try to assume something of our
colder race's demeanor, but even the passer on the horse-car can see
that it is not native with them, and is better pleased when they
forget us, and ungenteely laugh in encountering friends, letting
their white teeth glitter through the generous lips that open to
their ears. In the streets branching upward from this avenue, very
little colored men and maids play with broken or enfeebled toys, or
sport on the wooden pavements of the entrances to the inner courts.
Now and then a colored soldier or sailor--looking strange in his
uniform even after the custom of several years--emerges f
rom those passages; or, more rarely, a black gentleman, stricken in
years, and cased in shining broadcloth, walks solidly down the brick
sidewalk, cane in hand--a vision of serene self-complacency and so
plainly the expression of virtuous public sentiment that the great
colored louts, innocent enough till then in their idleness, are taken
with a sudden sense of depravity, and loaf guiltily up against the
house-walls. At the same moment, perhaps, a young damsel, amorously
scuffling with an admirer through one of the low open windows,
suspends the strife, and bids him--"Go along, now, do!" More rarely
yet than the gentleman described, one may see a white girl among the
dark neighbors, whose frowsy head is uncovered, and whose sleeves are
rolled up to her elbows, and who, though no doubt quite at home,
looks as strange there as that pale anomaly which may sometimes be
seen among a crew of blackbirds.
An air not so much of decay as of unthrift, and yet hardly of
unthrift, seems to prevail in the neighborhood, which has none of the
aggressive and impudent squalor of an Irish quarter and none of the
surly wickedenss of a low American street. A gaiety not born of the
things that bring its serious joy to the true New England heart--a
ragged gaiety, which comes of summer in the blood, and not in the
pocket or the conscience, and which affects the countenance and the
whole demeanor, setting the feet to some inward music, and at times
bursting into a line of song or a childlike and irresponsible laugh--
gives tone to the visible life and wakens a very friendly spirit in
the passer, who somehow thinks there of a milder climate, and is half
persuaded that the orange-peel on the sidewalks came from fruit grown
in the soft atmosphere of those back courts.
It was in this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs. Johnson; and it
was from a colored boarding-house there that she came to
Charlesbridge to look at us, bringing her daughter of twelve years
with her. She was a matron of mature age and portly figure, with a
complexion like coffee soothed with the richest cream; and her
manners were so full of a certain tranquillity and grace that she
charmed away all our will to ask for references. It was only her
barbaric laughter and lawless eye that betrayed how slightly her New
England birth and breeding covered her ancestral traits, and bridged
the gulf of a thousand years of civilization that lay between her
race and ours. But in fact, she was doubly estranged by descent; for,
as we learned later, a sylvan wilderness mixed with that of the
desert in her veins; her grandfather was an Indian, and her ancestors
on this side had probably sold their lands for the same value in
trinkets that bought the original African pair on the other side.
The first day that Mrs. Johnson descended into our kitchen she
conjured from the malicious disorder in which it had been left by the
flitting Irish kobold a dinner that revealed the inspirations of
genius, and was quite different from a dinner of mere routine and
laborious talent. Something original and authentic mingled with the
accustomed flavors; and, though vague reminiscences of canal-boat
travel and woodland camps arose from the relish of certain of the
dishes, there was yet the assurance of such power in the preparation
of the whole that we knew her to be merely running over the chords of
our appetite with preliminary savors, as a musician acquaints his
touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano before breaking into
brilliant and triumphant execution. Within a week she had mastered
her instrument, and thereafter there was no faltering in her
performances, which she varied constantly, through inspiration or
from suggestion.... But, after all, it was in puddings that Mrs.
Johnson chiefly excelled. She was one of those cooks--rare as men of
genius in literature--who love their own dishes; and she had, in her
personally childlike simplicity of taste and the inherited appetites
of her savage forefathers, a dominant passion for sweets. So far as
we could learn, she subsisted principally upon puddings and tea.
Through the same primitive instincts, no doubt, she loved praise. She
openly exulted in our artless flatteries of her skill; she waited
jealously at the head of the kitchen stairs to hear what was said of
her work, especially if there were guests; and she was never too
weary to attempt emprises of cookery.
While engaged in these, she wore a species of sightly handkerchief
like a turban upon her head, and about her person those mystical
swathings in which old ladies of the African race delight. But she
most pleasured our sense of beauty and moral fitness when, after the
last pan was washed and the last pot was scraped, she lighted a
potent pipe, and, taking her stand at the kitchen door, laded the
soft evening air with its pungent odors. If we surprised her at these
supreme moments, she took the pipe from her lips and put it behind
her, with a low, mellow chuckle and a look of half-defiant
consciousness, never guessing that none of her merits took us half so
much as the cheerful vice which she only feigned to conceal.
Some things she could not do so perfectly as cooking because of her
failing eyesight, and we persuaded her that spectacles would both
become and befriend a lady of her years, and so bought her a pair of
steel-bowed glasses. She wore them in some great emergencies at
first, but had clearly no pride in them. Before long she laid them
aside altogether, and they had passed from our thoughts, when one day
we heard her mellow note of laughter and her daughter's harsher
cackle outside our door, and, opening it, beheld Mrs. Johnson in
gold-bowed spectacles of massive frame. We then learned that their
purchase was in fulfilment of a vow made long ago, in the lifetime of
Mr. Johnson, that if ever she wore glasses, they should be gold-
bowed; and I hope the manes of the dead were half as happy in these
votive spectacles as the simple soul that offered them.
She and her late partner were the parents of eleven children, some of
whom were dead and some of whom were wanderers in unknown parts.
During his lifetime she had kept a little shop in her native town,
and it was only within a few years that she had gone into service.
She cherished a natural haughtiness of spirit, and resented control,
although disposed to do all she could of her own notion. Being told
to say when she wanted an afternoon, she explained that when she
wanted an afternoon she always took it without asking, but always
planned so as not to discommode the ladies with whom she lived.
These, she said, had numbered twenty-seven within three years, which
made us doubt the success of her system in all cases, though she
merely held out the fact as an assurance of her faith in the future,
and a proof of the ease with which places are to be found. She
contended, moreover, that a lady who had for thirty years had a house
of her own was in nowise bound to ask permission to receive visits
from friends where she might be living, but that they ought freely to
come and go like other guests. In this spirit she once invited her
son-in-law, Professor Jones, of Providence, to dine with her; and her
defied mistress, on entering the dining-room found the Professor at
pudding and tea there--an impressively respectable figure in black
clothes, with a black face rendered yet more effective by a pair of
green goggles. It appeared that this dark professor was a light of
phrenology in Rhode Island, and that he was believed to have uncommon
virtue in his science by reason of being blind as well as black.
I am loath to confess that Mrs. Johnson had not a flattering opinion
of the Caucasian race in all respects. In fact, she had very good
philosophical and scriptural reasons for looking upon us as an
upstart people of new blood, who had come into their whiteness by no
creditable or pleasant process. The late Mr. Johnson, who had died in
the West Indies, whither he voyaged for his health in quality of a
cook upon a Down East schooner, was a man of letters, and had written
a book to show the superiority of the black over the white branches
of the human family. In this he held that, as all islands have been
at their first discovery found peopled by blacks, we must needs
believe that humanity was first created of that color. Mrs. Johnson
could not show us her husband's work (a sole copy in the library of
an English gentleman at Port au Prince is not to be bought for
money), but she often developed its arguments to the lady of the
house; and one day, with a great show of reluctance and many protests
that no personal slight was meant, let fall the fact that Mr. Johnson
believed the white race descended from Gehaz the leper, upon whom the
leprosy of Naaman fell when the latter returned by divine favor to
his original blackness. "And he went out from his presence a leper as
white as snow," said Mrs. Johnson, quoting irrefutable Scripture.
"Leprosy, leprosy," she added thoughtfully--"nothing but leprosy
bleached you out."
It seems to me much in her praise that she did not exult in our taint
and degradation, as some white philosophers used to do in the
opposite idea that a part of the human family were cursed to lasting
blackness and slavery in Ham and his children, but even told us of a
remarkable approach to whiteness in many of her own offspring. In a
kindred spirit of charity, no doubt, she refused ever to attend
church with people of her elder and wholesomer blood. When she went
to church, she said, she always went to a white church, though while
with us I am bound to say she never went to any. She professed to
read her Bible in her bedroom on Sundays; but we suspected from
certain sounds and odors which used to steal out of this sanctuary,
that her piety more commonly found expression in dozing and smoking.
I would not make a wanton jest here of Mrs. Johnson's anxiety to
claim honor for the African color, while denying this color in many
of her own family. It afforded a glimpse of the pain with which all
her people must endure, however proudly they hide it or light-
heartedly forget it, from the despite and contumely to which they are
guiltlessly born; and when I thought how irreparable was this
disgrace and calamity of a black skin, and how irreparable it must be
for ages yet, in this world where every other chance and all manner
of wilful guilt and wickedness may hope for covert and pardon, I had
little heart to laugh. Indeed, it was so pathetic to hear this poor
old soul talk of her dead and lost ones, and try, in spite of all Mr.
Johnson's theories and her own arrogant generalizations to establish
their whiteness, that we must have been very cruel and silly people
to turn their sacred fables even into matter of question. I have no
doubt that her Antoinette Anastasia and her Thomas Jefferson
Wilberforce--it is impossible to give a full idea of the splendor and
scope of the baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson's family--have as light
skins and as golden hair in heaven as her reverend maternal fancy
painted for them in our world. There, certainly, they would not be
subject to tanning, which had ruined the delicate complexion, and had
knotted into black woolly tangles the once wavy blond locks of our
little maid-servant Naomi; and I would fain believe that Toussaint
Washington Johnson, who ran away to sea so many years ago, has found
some fortunate zone where his hair and skin keep the same sunny and
rosy tints they wore to his mother's eyes in infancy. But I have no
means of knowing this, or of telling whether he was the prodigy of
intellect that he was declared to be. Naomi could no more be taken in
proof of the one assertion than of the other. When she came to us, it
was agreed that she should go to school; but she overruled her mother
in this as in everything else, and never went. Except Sunday-school
lessons, she had no other instructions than that her mistress gave
her in the evenings, when a heavy day's play and the natural
influences of the hour conspired with original causes to render her
powerless before words of one syllable.
The first week of her services she was obedient and faithful to her
duties; but, relaxing in the atmosphere of a house which seems to
demoralize all menials, she shortly fell into disorderly ways of
lying in wait for callers out of doors, and, when people rang, of
running up the front steps and letting them in from the outside. As
the season expanded, and the fine weather became confirmed, she spent
her time in the fields, appearing at the house only when nature
importunately craved molasses.
In her untamable disobedience, Naomi alone betrayed her sylvan blood,
for she was in all other respects Negro and not Indian. But it was of
her aboriginal ancestry that Mrs. Johnson chiefly boasted--when not
engaged in argument to maintain the superiority of the African race.
She loved to descant upon it as the cause and explanation of her own
arrogant habit of feeling; and she seemed, indeed, to have inherited
something of the Indian's _hauteur_ along with the Ethiop's
subtle cunning and abundant amiability. She gave many instances in
which her pride had met and overcome the insolence of employers, and
the kindly old creature was by no means singular in her pride of
being reputed proud.
She could never have been a woman of strong logical faculties, but
she had in some things a very surprising and awful astuteness. She
seldom introduced any purpose directly, but bore all about it, and
then suddenly sprung it upon her unprepared antagonist. At other
times she obscurely hinted a reason, and left a conclusion to be
inferred; as when she warded off reproach for some delinquency by
saying in a general way that she had lived with ladies who used to
come scolding into the kitchen after they had taken their bitters.
"Quality ladies took their bitters regular," she added, to remove any
sting of personality from her remark; for, from many things she had
let fall, we knew that she did not regard us as quality. On the
contrary, she often tried to overbear us with the gentility of her
former places; and would tell the lady over whom she reigned that she
had lived with folks worth their three and four hundred thousand
dollars, who never complained as she did of the ironing. Yet she had
a sufficient regard for the literary occupations of the family, Mr.
Johnson having been an author. She even professed to have herself
written a book, which was still in manuscript and preserved somewhere
among her best clothes.
It was well, on many accounts, to be in contact with a mind so
original and suggestive as Mrs. Johnson's. We loved to trace its
intricate yet often transparent operations, and were perhaps too fond
of explaining its peculiarities by facts of ancestry--of finding
hints of the Pow-wow of the Grand Custom in each grotesque
development. We were conscious of something warmer in this old soul
than in ourselves, and sometimes wilder, and we chose to think it the
tropic and the untracked forest. She had scarcely any being apart
from her affection; she had no morality, but was good because she
neither hated nor envied; and she might have been a saint far more
easily than far more civilized people.
There was that also in her sinuous yet malleable nature, so full of
guile and so full of goodness, that reminded us pleasantly of lowly
folks in elder lands, where relaxing oppressions have lifted the
restraints of fear between master and servant without disturbing the
familiarity of their relation. She advised freely with us upon all
household matters, and took a motherly interest in whatever concerned
us. She could be flattered or caressed into almost any service, but
no threat or command could move her. When she erred, she never
acknowledged her wrong in words, but handsomely expressed her regrets
in a pudding or sent up her apologies in a favorite dish secretly
prepared. We grew so well used to this form of exculpation that,
whenever Mrs. Johnson took an afternoon at an inconvenient season, we
knew that for a week afterward 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 be obliged to 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 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 blond
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 pasture 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 cornfields 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 that there was
no one so agreeable in society, or so quickwitted in affairs, as
Hippolyto, when he chose. ...
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 masterpiece 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 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 until 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."--_Suburban Sketches._