Our landlady's daughter is a young lady of some pretensions to
gentility. She wears her bonnet well back on her head, which is known
by all to be a mark of high breeding. She wears her trains very long,
as the great ladies do in Europe. To be sure, their dresses are so made
only to sweep the tapestried floors of chateaux and palaces; as those
odious aristocrats of the other side do not go draggling through the mud
in silks and satins, but, forsooth, must ride in coaches when they
are in full dress. It is true, that, considering various habits of the
American people, also the little accidents which the best-kept sidewalks
are liable to, a lady who has swept a mile of them is not exactly in
such a condition that one would care to be her neighbor. But then there
is no need of being so hard on these slight weaknesses of the poor, dear
women as our little deformed gentleman was the other day.
--There are no such women as the Boston women, Sir,--he said. Forty-two
degrees, north latitude, Rome, Sir, Boston, Sir! They had grand women in
old Rome, Sir,--and the women bore such men--children as never the world
saw before. And so it was here, Sir. I tell you, the revolution the
Boston boys started had to run in woman's milk before it ran in man's
blood, Sir!
But confound the make-believe women we have turned loose in our
streets!--where do they come from? Not out of Boston parlors, I trust.
Why, there is n't a beast or a bird that would drag its tail through the
dirt in the way these creatures do their dresses. Because a queen or
a duchess wears long robes on great occasions, a maid-of-all-work or a
factory-girl thinks she must make herself a nuisance by trailing through
the street, picking up and carrying about with her pah!--that's what
I call getting vulgarity into your bones and marrow. Making believe be
what you are not is the essence of vulgarity. Show over dirt is the
one attribute of vulgar people. If any man can walk behind one of these
women and see what she rakes up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he
has got a tough stomach. I wouldn't let one of 'em into my room without
serving 'em as David served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,--cut off
his skirts, Sir! cut off his skirts!
I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended in
the way he condemned.
Stylish women, I don't doubt,--said the Little Gentleman.--Don't tell me
that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all about her sweet
and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show. I won't believe it of a
lady. There are some things that no fashion has any right to touch, and
cleanliness is one of those things. If a woman wishes to show that her
husband or her father has got money, which she wants and means to spend,
but doesn't know how, let her buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to
her dress when she goes out to walk, but let her unpin it before she
goes into the house;--there may be poor women that will think it worth
disinfecting. It is an insult to a respectable laundress to carry such
things into a house for her to deal with. I don't like the Bloomers any
too well,--in fact, I never saw but one, and she--or he, or it--had a
mob of boys after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had
been a----
The Little Gentleman stopped short,--flushed somewhat, and looked round
with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of any
bodily misfortune are very apt to cast round them. His eye wandered
over the company, none of whom, excepting myself and one other, had,
probably, noticed the movement. They fell at last on Iris,--his next
neighbor, you remember.
--We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that person's
eyes have been fixed on us.
Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the person.
Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice, of love, leak
out in this way. There is no need of Mrs. Felix Lorraine's reflection
in the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting evil for us behind our
backs. We know it, as we know by the ominous stillness of a child that
some mischief or other is going-on. A young girl betrays, in a moment,
that her eyes have been feeding on the face where you find them fixed,
and not merely brushing over it with their pencils of blue or brown
light.
A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also observe,
to that upon which we look. Roses redden the cheeks of her who stoops to
gather them, and buttercups turn little people's chins yellow. When we
look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if we would enlarge to
fill it. When we examine a minute object, we naturally contract, not
only our foreheads, but all our dimensions. If I see two men wrestling,
I wrestle too, with my limbs and features. When a country-fellow comes
upon the stage, you will see twenty faces in the boxes putting on the
bumpkin expression. There is no need of multiplying instances to reach
this generalization; every person and thing we look upon puts its
special mark upon us. If this is repeated often enough, we get a
permanent resemblance to it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took
from it. Husband and wife come to look alike at last, as has often been
noticed. It is a common saying of a jockey, that he is “all horse”; and
I have often fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an
angular movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working
of its handle.
All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention that
the Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him with her
soul in her eyes, when his glance rested on her after wandering round
the company. What he thought, it is hard to say; but the shadow of
suspicion faded off from his face, and he looked calmly into the amber
eyes, resting his cheek upon the hand that wore the red jewel.
--If it were a possible thing,--women are such strange creatures! Is
there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them? Just
see how they marry! A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood is like
one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd, fantastic root
that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above and bifurcated
below, will always contrive to make a man--such as he is--out of it. I
should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a Gorilla,
that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
--A child,--yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child! Do you
know how Art brings all ages together? There is no age to the angels
and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he shares
their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim. The youthful
painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a brother, and
the veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to which his own is of
patriarchal antiquity.
But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom
Nature has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain. Pity, I suppose.
They say that leads to love.
--I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and
determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was
going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were
drifting. I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I can
look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent feebleness
of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very hard to cheat,
is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine, knowing that all is in
readiness and the slow-match burning quietly down to the powder. He will
leave it by-and-by, and then it will take care of itself.
One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a house
and the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the building is
on fire. Hark! There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive, crisp, not loud,
but very knowing little creeping crackle that is tolerably intelligible.
There is a whiff of something floating about, suggestive of toasting
shingles. Also a sharp pyroligneous-acid pungency in the air that stings
one's eyes. Let us get up and see what is going on.--Oh,--oh,--oh! do
you know what has got hold of you? It is the great red dragon that is
born of the little red eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing
red manes, and his thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red
eyes glaring at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues
lapping the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath
warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber sweat
that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap. Run for your life! leap!
or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing but a coroner
would take for the wreck of a human being!
If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away
comparison, I shall be much obliged to him. All I intended to say was,
that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know that
they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among them. I
don't pretend to say or know what it is that brings these two persons
together;--and when I say together, I only mean that there is an evident
affinity of some kind or other which makes their commonest intercourse
strangely significant, as that each seems to understand a look or a
word of the other. When the young girl laid her hand on the Little
Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly shocked the Model, you may
remember,--I saw that she had learned the lion-tamer's secret. She
masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind of awe of him, as the man
who goes into the cage has of the monster that he makes a baby of.
One of two things must happen. The first is love, downright love, on
the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man. You may
laugh, if you like. But women are apt to love the men who they think
have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love like one that has
thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen
it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him
whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and
disappointment? What would become of him, if this fresh soul should
stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out
of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari,
with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires in
the shadowy waters that hold her burning image?
--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course. I should think the
chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than
she to marry him.
There is one other thing that might happen. If the interest he awakes in
her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will
glance off from him into some great passion or other. All excitements
run to love in women of a certain--let us not say age, but youth. An
electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a
bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned
into a love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her. I
should like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted,
and watch if she did not turn so as to point north and south,--as she
would, if the love-currents are like those of the earth our mother.
Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's “Boy of Windermere”? This
boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the
hooting of the owls, who would answer him
“with quivering peals,
And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled.”
When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for
their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant
waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with
new force upon his perceptions.--Read the sonnet, if you please;--it
is Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid
in description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but immensely
suggestive of “imagination,” to use a mild term, when related as an
actual fact of a sprightly youngster. All I want of it is to enforce the
principle, that, when the door of the soul is once opened to a guest,
there is no knowing who will come in next.
--Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and
characters. Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the
drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but there is
a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her
drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot
in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her
thoughts. This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at it honorably.
I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman's
chamber. How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only guess.
His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in the night,
I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on the wall of the
house opposite. If the times of witchcraft were not over, I should be
afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from which there come such
strange noises. Sometimes it is the dragging of something heavy over the
floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,--it sounds so like what people
that kill other people have to do now and then. Occasionally I hear very
sweet strains of music,--whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a
human voice, strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but
through the partition I could not be quite sure. If I have not heard
a woman cry and moan, and then again laugh as though she would die
laughing, I have heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess
it--I have covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy
in my dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that
so-called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a
sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman
in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a
neck-lace, but a dull-stain.
Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions about
the matter,--I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take all that
nonsense out of any man's head! It is not our beliefs that frighten us
half so much as our fancies. A man not only believes, but knows he runs
a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but it does n't worry him
much. On the other hand, carry that man across a pasture a little way
from some dreary country-village, and show him an old house where there
were strange deaths a good many years ago, and there are rumors of ugly
spots on the walls,--the old man hung himself in the garret, that is
certain, and ever since the country-people have called it “the haunted
house,”--the owners have n't been able to let it since the last tenants
left on account of the noises,--so it has fallen into sad decay, and the
moss grows on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have
turned black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear,
and the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,
--take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old
house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there
alone,--how do you think he will like it? He doesn't believe one word
of ghosts,--but then he knows, that, whether waking or sleeping, his
imagination will people the haunted chambers with ghostly images. It is
not what we believe, as I said before, that frightens us commonly,
but what we conceive. A principle that reaches a good way if I am not
mistaken. I say, then, that, if these odd sounds coming from the Little
Gentleman's chamber sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get
to sleep, it is not because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or
mysterious way. The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head
was one that was founded on the landlady's story of his having a pile
of gold; it was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of
sweating gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews
odious and afford a pretext for plundering them. As for the sound like a
woman laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman's voice; for, in
the first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly, he may
have an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what they call
the vox humana stop. If he moves his bed round to get away from the
window, or for any such reason, there is nothing very frightful in that
simple operation. Most of our foolish conceits explain themselves in
some such simple way. And, yet, for all that, I confess, that, when I
woke up the other evening, and heard, first a sweet complaining cry, and
then footsteps, and then the dragging sound,--nothing but his bed, I am
quite sure,--I felt a stirring in the roots of my hair as the feasters
did in Keats's terrible poem of “Lamia.”
There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie
awake and get listening for sounds. Just keep your ears open any time
after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark
night. What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will
hear! The stillness of night is a vulgar error. All the dead things seem
to be alive. Crack! That is the old chest of drawers; you never hear it
crack in the daytime. Creak! There's a door ajar; you know you shut them
all.
Where can that latch be that rattles so? Is anybody trying it softly?
or, worse than any body, is---? (Cold shiver.) Then a sudden gust that
jars all the windows;--very strange!--there does not seem to be any wind
about that it belongs to. When it stops, you hear the worms boring in
the powdery beams overhead. Then steps outside,--a stray animal, no
doubt. All right,--but a gentle moisture breaks out all over you; and
then something like a whistle or a cry,--another gust of wind, perhaps;
that accounts for the rustling that just made your heart roll over and
tumble about, so that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs
than a part of your own body; then a crash of something that has
fallen,--blown over, very likely---Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for
you are damp and cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling
so that the death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!
No,--night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings. Who
ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it, of that
Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,--foxes, and owls, and
crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on moonshiny
nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the eyes of dead
fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach? Our old mother Nature
has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when she comes in her dress
of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops; but when she follows us
up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black velvet and diamonds, every
creak of her sandals and every whisper of her lips is full of mystery
and fear.
You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is
anything about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it
should not be. Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that has
puzzled me, and make me laugh at the notions which began, I suppose, in
nightmares, and ended by keeping my imagination at work so as almost to
make me uncomfortable at times. But it is not so easy to visit him as
some of our other boarders, for various reasons which I will not stop to
mention. I think some of them are rather pleased to get “the Professor”
under their ceilings.
The young man John, for instance, asked me to come up one day and try
some “old Burbon,” which he said was A 1. On asking him what was the
number of his room, he answered, that it was forty-'leven, sky-parlor
floor, but that I shouldn't find it, if he did n't go ahead to show me
the way. I followed him to his habitat, being very willing to see in
what kind of warren he burrowed, and thinking I might pick up something
about the boarders who had excited my curiosity.
Mighty close quarters they were where the young man John bestowed
himself and his furniture; this last consisting of a bed, a chair,
a bureau, a trunk, and numerous pegs with coats and “pants” and
“vests,”--as he was in the habit of calling waist-coats and pantaloons
or trousers,--hanging up as if the owner had melted out of them.
Several prints were pinned up unframed,--among them that grand national
portrait-piece, “Barnum presenting Ossian E. Dodge to Jenny Lind,” and a
picture of a famous trot, in which I admired anew the cabalistic air of
that imposing array of expressions, and especially the Italicized word,
“Dan Mace names b. h. Major Slocum,” and “Hiram Woodruff names g. m.
Lady Smith.” “Best three in five. Time: 2.40, 2.46, 2.50.”
That set me thinking how very odd this matter of trotting horses is, as
an index of the mathematical exactness of the laws of living mechanism.
I saw Lady Suffolk trot a mile in 2.26. Flora Temple has trotted close
down to 2.20; and Ethan Allen in 2.25, or less. Many horses have trotted
their mile under 2.30; none that I remember in public as low down as
2.20. From five to ten seconds, then, in about a hundred and sixty is
the whole range of the maxima of the present race of trotting horses.
The same thing is seen in the running of men. Many can run a mile in
five minutes; but when one comes to the fractions below, they taper down
until somewhere about 4.30 the maximum is reached. Averages of masses
have been studied more than averages of maxima and minima. We know from
the Registrar-General's Reports, that a certain number of children--say
from one to two dozen--die every year in England from drinking hot water
out of spouts of teakettles. We know, that, among suicides, women and
men past a certain age almost never use fire-arms. A woman who has made
up her mind to die is still afraid of a pistol or a gun. Or is it that
the explosion would derange her costume?
I say, averages of masses we have, but our tables of maxima we owe
to the sporting men more than to the philosophers. The lesson their
experience teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,--does nothing per
saltum. The greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a
small fraction of an idea ahead of the second best. Just look at the
chess-players. Leaving out the phenomenal exceptions, the nice
shades that separate the skilful ones show how closely their brains
approximate,--almost as closely as chronometers. Such a person is a
“knight-player,”--he must have that piece given him. Another must have
two pawns. Another, “pawn and two,” or one pawn and two moves. Then
we find one who claims “pawn and move,” holding himself, with this
fractional advantage, a match for one who would be pretty sure to beat
him playing even.--So much are minds alike; and you and I think we
are “peculiar,”--that Nature broke her jelly-mould after shaping our
cerebral convolutions. So I reflected, standing and looking at the
picture.
--I say, Governor,--broke in the young man John,--them bosses '11 stay
jest as well, if you'll only set down. I've had 'em this year, and they
haven't stirred.--He spoke, and handed the chair towards me,--seating
himself, at the same time, on the end of the bed.
You have lived in this house some time?--I said,--with a note of
interrogation at the end of the statement.
Do I look as if I'd lost much flesh--said he, answering my question by
another.
No,--said I;--for that matter, I think you do credit to “the bountifully
furnished table of the excellent lady who provides so liberally for the
company that meets around her hospitable board.”
[The sentence in quotation-marks was from one of those disinterested
editorials in small type, which I suspect to have been furnished by
a friend of the landlady's, and paid for as an advertisement. This
impartial testimony to the superior qualities of the establishment and
its head attracted a number of applicants for admission, and a couple
of new boarders made a brief appearance at the table. One of them was
of the class of people who grumble if they don't get canvas-backs and
woodcocks every day, for three-fifty per week. The other was subject to
somnambulism, or walking in the night, when he ought to have been
asleep in his bed. In this state he walked into several of the boarders'
chambers, his eyes wide open, as is usual with somnambulists, and,
from some odd instinct or other, wishing to know what the hour was, got
together a number of their watches, for the purpose of comparing them,
as it would seem. Among them was a repeater, belonging to our young
Marylander. He happened to wake up while the somnambulist was in his
chamber, and, not knowing his infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him
a dreadful shaking, after which he tied his hands and feet, and so left
him till morning, when he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking
care of such cases of somnambulism.]
If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, over this parenthesis,
you will come to our conversation, which it has interrupted.
It a'n't the feed,--said the young man John,--it's the old woman's looks
when a fellah lays it in too strong. The feed's well enough. After geese
have got tough, 'n' turkeys have got strong, 'n' lamb's got old, 'n'
veal's pretty nigh beef, 'n' sparragrass 's growin' tall 'n' slim 'n'
scattery about the head, 'n' green peas are gettin' so big 'n' hard
they'd be dangerous if you fired 'em out of a revolver, we get hold of
all them delicacies of the season. But it's too much like feedin' on
live folks and devourin' widdah's substance, to lay yourself out in the
eatin' way, when a fellah 's as hungry as the chap that said a turkey
was too much for one 'n' not enough for two. I can't help lookin' at
the old woman. Corned-beef-days she's tolerable calm. Roastin'-days she
worries some, 'n' keeps a sharp eye on the chap that carves. But when
there's anything in the poultry line, it seems to hurt her feelin's so
to see the knife goin' into the breast and joints comin' to pieces, that
there's no comfort in eatin'. When I cut up an old fowl and help the
boarders, I always feel as if I ought to say, Won't you have a slice of
widdah?--instead of chicken.
The young man John fell into a train of reflections which ended in his
producing a Bologna sausage, a plate of “crackers,” as we Boston folks
call certain biscuits, and the bottle of whiskey described as being A 1.
Under the influence of the crackers and sausage, he grew cordial and
communicative.
It was time, I thought, to sound him as to those of our boarders who had
excited my curiosity.
What do you think of our young Iris?--I began.
Fust-rate little filly;-he said.--Pootiest and nicest little chap
I've seen since the schoolma'am left. Schoolma'am was a brown-haired
one,--eyes coffee-color. This one has got wine-colored eyes,--'n' that
's the reason they turn a fellah's head, I suppose.
This is a splendid blonde,--I said,--the other was a brunette. Which
style do you like best?
Which do I like best, boiled mutton or roast mutton?--said the young man
John. Like 'em both,--it a'n't the color of 'em makes the goodness. I
've been kind of lonely since schoolma'am went away. Used to like to
look at her. I never said anything particular to her, that I remember,
but--
I don't know whether it was the cracker and sausage, or that the young
fellow's feet were treading on the hot ashes of some longing that had
not had time to cool, but his eye glistened as he stopped.
I suppose she wouldn't have looked at a fellah like me,--he said,--but I
come pretty near tryin'. If she had said, Yes, though, I shouldn't have
known what to have done with her. Can't marry a woman now-a-days till
you're so deaf you have to cock your head like a parrot to hear what she
says, and so longsighted you can't see what she looks like nearer than
arm's-length.
Here is another chance for you,--I said.--What do you want nicer than
such a young lady as Iris?
It's no use,--he answered.--I look at them girls and feel as the fellah
did when he missed catchin' the trout.--'To'od 'a' cost more butter to
cook him 'n' he's worth,--says the fellah.--Takes a whole piece o' goods
to cover a girl up now-a-days. I'd as lief undertake to keep a span of
elephants,--and take an ostrich to board, too,--as to marry one of 'em.
What's the use? Clerks and counter-jumpers ain't anything. Sparragrass
and green peas a'n't for them,--not while they're young and tender.
Hossback-ridin' a'n't for them,--except once a year, on Fast-day. And
marryin' a'n't for them. Sometimes a fellah feels lonely, and would
like to have a nice young woman, to tell her how lonely he feels. And
sometimes a fellah,--here the young man John looked very confidential,
and, perhaps, as if a little ashamed of his weakness,--sometimes a
fellah would like to have one o' them small young ones to trot on his
knee and push about in a little wagon,--a kind of a little Johnny, you
know;--it's odd enough, but, it seems to me, nobody can afford them
little articles, except the folks that are so rich they can buy
everything, and the folks that are so poor they don't want anything. It
makes nice boys of us young fellahs, no doubt! And it's pleasant to see
fine young girls sittin', like shopkeepers behind their goods, waitin',
and waitin', and waitin', 'n' no customers,--and the men lingerin' round
and lookin' at the goods, like folks that want to be customers, but have
n't the money!
Do you think the deformed gentleman means to make love to Iris?--I said.
What! Little Boston ask that girl to marry him! Well, now, that's cumin'
of it a little too strong. Yes, I guess she will marry him and carry
him round in a basket, like a lame bantam: Look here!--he said,
mysteriously;--one of the boarders swears there's a woman comes to see
him, and that he has heard her singin' and screechin'. I should like
to know what he's about in that den of his. He lays low 'n' keeps
dark,--and, I tell you, there's a good many of the boarders would like
to get into his chamber, but he don't seem to want 'em. Biddy could
tell somethin' about what she's seen when she 's been to put his room
to rights. She's a Paddy 'n' a fool, but she knows enough to keep her
tongue still. All I know is, I saw her crossin' herself one day when she
came out of that room. She looked pale enough, 'n' I heard her mutterin'
somethin' or other about the Blessed Virgin. If it had n't been for the
double doors to that chamber of his, I'd have had a squint inside before
this; but, somehow or other, it never seems to happen that they're both
open at once.
What do you think he employs himself about? said I.
The young man John winked.
I waited patiently for the thought, of which this wink was the blossom,
to come to fruit in words.