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
afterwards 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 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 comparison with the blonde 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 l