ow
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 hangdog 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 there was no one so agreeable in
society, or so quick-witted 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 masterstroke 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 till 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