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U -^^->> '>>>3 3:':i>33 ^3- 3.'0^ >:» yx»::» j> > :3» ^ > '- ' ^ 2> ' ^^ ;, ^■">>3> .360 3 ' "i:> 3»3 ' 3" 3>_3'-.>, ,3»:?3>3~33 ::> >> >: 3 3>3:^:^ / 'i^,/ " She lifcliteil a potent pipe." See page -l-l. ZP/rc - SUBURBAN SKETCHES. /BY W. D. HOWELLS, AUTHOR OF "VENETIAN LIFE," "ITALIAN JOUENEYS," ETC. NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY AUGUSTUS HOPPIN. 'w OF ca^i;:^ >iN /,;> COPYRIGHT V BOSTON: JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY. Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 1872. Yo c-' Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by AViLLIAM D. IIOWELLS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusette RIVERSIDE, CASIBRrDGB; BTEREOTTPED AND PRINTED BT H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. v3 o ^4 i CONTENTS. PAOB. Mrs. Johnson 11 Doorstep Acquaintance 35 A Pedestrian Tour 60 By Horse-Car to Boston 91 A Day's Pleasure 115 A Romance of Real Life 171 Scene 190 Jubilee Dats 195 Some Lessons from the School of AIokals . . 220 Flitting . . 241 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. SlIK LIGHllil) A roTKXT PIPE /• " HUT 1 SUPPOSE THIS WINE IS Nor JIADE UK (JUAPES, SIGNOU ? " LOOKING ABOUT, I SAW TWO WOMEN THE YOUNG LADY IX BLACK, WHO ALIGIITI-.U Af A Mosr ()i;i)I- NARY LITTLE STREET THAT SWEET YOUNG BLONDE, WHO AUHnES BY MOST TRAINS FP.ANK AND LUCY STALKED AHEAD, WITH SHAWLS DRAGGING FROM THEIR ARMS THEY SKIRMISH ABOUT HIM WITH EVERY SORT OF QUERY A GAUNT FIGURE OF FORLORN AND CURIOUS SSIARTNESS . THE SPECTACLE AS WE BEHELD IT VACANT AND CEREMONIOUS ZEAL PAGE 'niiit. ■ 65 !)-2 11!) 154 ir.i 171 199 252 SUBUEBAI^ SKETCHES. SUBURBAN SKETCHES. MRS. JOHNSON. 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 side- walks 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 aban- doned hoop-skirts defied decay ; and near the half- finished wooden houses, empty mortar-beds, and bits of lath and slate strewn over the scarred and muti- lated ground, added their interest to the scene. A shaggy drift hung upon the trees before our own house (which had been built some years earlier),, while its swollen eaves wept silently and incessantly 12 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. upon the embankments lifting its base several feet above the common level. This heavenly weather, which the Pilgrim Fathers, with the idea of turning their thoughts effectually from earthly pleasures, came so far to discover, con- tinued with slio;ht amelioration throuo-hout 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 struff- gled 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 reck- less native grape-vine to wander and Avanton 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 heav- ens 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 south- west, and all day in the grove across the way the orioles sang to their nestlings. The butcher's wagon rattled merrily up to our gate every morning ; and if we had kept no other reckoning, we should have known it was Thursday by the grocer. We were living in the country with the conveniences and lux- uries of the city about us. The house was almost new and in perfect repair ; and, better than all, the MRS. JOHNSON. 13 kitchen had as yet given no signs of unrest in those volcanic agencies which are constantly at work there, and which, with sudden explosion, make Hercula- neums and Pompeiis of so many smihng 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 se- curity. 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 cer- tainly 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 pleas- ant 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 Avhole days passed without the move- ment of any wheels but the butcher's upon our street, which flourished in ragweed and butter-cups and daisies, and in the autumn burned, like the borders of nearly all the streets in Charlesbridge, with the pallid azure flame of the succor)'". The neighborhood was in all things a frontier between city and country. The horse-cars, the type of such 14 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. civilization — full of imposture, discomfort, and sul)- lime 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 pas- toral people of the golden age, to know the several voices of the cows pastured in the vacant lots, and, like ensine-drivers of the iron acje, tO' distinguish the different whistles of the locomotives passing on the neicrhborino; railroad. The trains shook the house as they thundered along, and at night were a kind of company, while by day we had the society of the innumerable birds. Now and then, also, the little ragged boys in charge of the cows — which, tied by long ropes to trees, forever wound themselves tight up against the trunks, and had to be unwoimd with PTeat ado of hootino- and hammering — came and peered lustfully through the gate at our ripening pears. All round us carpenters were at work build- ing new houses ; but so far from troubling us, the strokes of their hammers fell softly upon the sense, like one's heart -beats upon one's own consciousness in the lapse from all fear of pain under the blessed charm of an anaesthetic. 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 stal- MES. JOHNSON. 15 wart proportions, were still as bitter as the scrub- biest 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 rVost 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 xs little prepared for her desertion as for any other change of our moral state. But one day in Septem- ber 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 any one 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, irive warnino- 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 aner goder un po' dl clima prima di morire). Our climate was the only thing he had against us ; in every other respect he was a New-Englander, even to the early stages of con- sumption. He told me the story of his whole life, and of how in his adventurous youth he had left Milan and sojourned some years in Naples, vainly seeking his fortune there. Afterwards he went to Greece, and set up his ancestral business of green- grocer in Athens, faring there no better, but rather worse than in Naples, because of the deeper wicked- ness of the Athenians, who cheated him right and left, and whose laws gave him no redress. The Neapolitans were bad enough, he said, making a wry face, but the Greeks ! — and he spat the Greeks out on the grass. At last, after much misfortune in 42 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. Europe, he betliouglit liim of coming to America, and he had never regretted it, but for the cHmate. You spent a good deal here, — nearly all you earned, — but then a poor man was a man, and the people were honest. It was wonderfal to him that they all knew how to read and write, and he viewed with inexpressible scorn those Irish who came to this country, and were so little sensible of the benefits it conferred upon them. Boston he believed the best city in America, and " Tell me," said he, " is there such a thing anywhere else in the world as that Public Library ? " He, a poor man, and almost unknown, had taken books from it to his own room, and was master to do so whenever he liked. He had thus been enabled to read Botta's history of the United States, an enormous compliment both to the country and the work which I doubt ever to have been paid before ; and he knew more about Wash- ington than I did, and desired to know more than I could tell him of the financial question among us. So we came to national politics, and then to Euro- pean affairs. " It appears that Garibaldi will not go to Rome this year," remarks my scissors-grinder, who is very red in his sympathies. " The Emperor forbids ! Well, patience ! And that blessed Pope, what does he want, that Pope ? He will be king and priest both, he will wear two pairs of shoes at once ! " I must confess that no other of my door- step acquaintance had so clear an idea as this one of the difference between things here and at home. To the minds of most we seemed divided here as there " But I .suitjiusL' this wine is not made of j^rapes, signer? " See pasre 43. DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 43 into rich and poor, — signori^ persone civili, and povera gente, — and their thoughts about us did not go beyond a speculation as to our individual willing- ness or ability to pay for organ -grinding. But this Lombard was worthy of his adopted country, and J forgive him the frank expression of a doubt that one day occurred to him, when offered a glass of Italian wine. He held it daintily between him and the sun for a smiling moment, and then said, as if our wine must needs be as ungenuine as our Italian, — was perhaps some expression from the surrouncUng cur- rant-bushes, harsh as that from the Northern tongues which could never give his language the true life and tonic charm, — " But I suppose this wine is not made of grapes, signor ? " Yet he was a very cour- teous old man, elaborate in greeting and leave-taking, and with a quicker sense than usual. It was ac- counted delicacy in him, that, when he had bidden- us a final adieu, he should never come near us again, though the date of his departure was postponed some weeks, and we heard him tinkling down the street, and stopping at the neighbors' houses. He was a keen-faced, thoughtful-looking man ; and he wore a blouse of blue cotton, from the pocket of which always dangled the leaves of some wild salad culled from our wasteful vacant lots or prodigal waysides. Altogether different in character was that Triest- ine, who came one evening to be helped home at the close of a very disastrous career in Mexico. He was a person of innumerable bows, and fluttered his bright-colored compliments about, till it appeared 44 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. that never before had such amiable people been asked charity by such a worthy and generous suf- ferer. In Trieste he had been a journalist, and it was evident enough from his speech that he was of a good education. He was vain of his Italian accent, which was peculiarly good for his heterogeneously peopled native city ; and he made a show of that marvelous facility of the Triestines in languages, by taking me down French books, Spanish books, Ger- man books, and reading from them all with the prop- erest accent. Yet with this boyish pride and self- satisfaction there was mixed a tone of bitter and worldly cynicism, a belief in fortune as the sole providence. As nearly as I could make out, he was a Johnson man in American politics ; upon the Mexican question he was independent, disdaining French and Mexicans alike. He was with the for- mer from the first, and had continued in the service of Maximilian after their withdrawal, till the execu- tion of that prince made Mexico no place for adven- turous merit. He was now o;oino; back to his native country, an ungrateful land enough, which had ill treated him long ago. but to which he nevertheless returned in a perfect gayety of temper. What a light-hearted rogue he was, — with such merry eyes, and su^cli a pleasant smile shaping his neatly trimmed beard and mustache ! After he had supped, and he stood with us at the door taking leave, something happened to be said of Italian songs, whereupon this blithe exile, whom the compassion of strangers was enabling to go home after many years of unprofitable I DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 4£ toil and danger to a country that had loved him not, fell to caroling a Venetian barcarole, and went sweetly away in its cadence. I bore him company as far as the gate of another Italian-speaking signor, and was there bidden adieu with great effusion, so that I forgot till he had left me to charge him not to be in fear of the house-dog, which barked but did not bite. In calling this after him, I had the mis- fortune to blunder in my verb. A man of another nation — perhaps another man of his own nation — would have cared rather for what I said than how I said it ; but he, as if too zealous for the honor of his beautiful language to endure a hurt to it even in that moment of erief, liftino; his hat, and bowino; for the last time, responded with a " Morde, non morsica, sign ore ! " and passed in under the pines, and next day to Italy. There is a little old Genoese lady comes to sell us pins, needles, thread, tape, and the like roha, whom I regard as leading quite an ideal life in some re- spects. Her traffic is limited to a certain number of families who speak more or less Italian ; and her days, so far as they are concerned, must be passed in an atmosphere of sympathy and kindliness. The truth is, we Northern and New World folk cannot help but cast a little romance about whoever come? to us from Italy, whether we have actually known the beauty and charm of that land or not. Then this old lady is in herself a very gentle and lovable kind of person, with a tender mother-face, which is also the face of a child. A smile plays always upon 46 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. her wrinkled visage, and her quick and restless eyes are full of friendliness. There is never much stuff in her basket, however, and it is something of a mys- tery how she manages to live from it. None but an Italian could, I am sure ; and her experience must test the full virtue of the national genius for cheap salads and much-extenuated soup-meat. I do not know whether it is native in her, or whether it is a grace acquired from long dealing with those kindly- liearted customers of hers in Charlesbridge, but she is of a most mmiificent spirit, and returns every smallest benefit with some present from her basket. She makes me ashamed of thino;s I have written about the sordidness of her race, but I shall vainly seek to atone for them by open-handedness to her. She will give favor for favor ; she will not even count the money she receives ; our bargaining is a contest of the courtliest civilities, ending in many an " Adieu ! " " To meet again ! " " Remain well ! " and " Finally ! " not surpassed if rivaled in any Italian street. In her ineffectual Avay, she brings us news of her different customei's, breaking up their stout Saxon names into tinkling polysyllables which suggest them only to the practiced sense, and is per- fectly patient and contented if we mistake one for another. She loves them all, but she pities them as living in a terrible climate ; and doubtless in her heart she purposes one day to go back to Italy, there to die. In the mean time she is very cheerful ; she, too, has had her troubles, — what troubles I do not remember, but those that come by sickness and by DOORSTEP ACQUAINT ANCE. 47 death, and that really seem no sorrows until they come to us, — yet she never complains. It is hard to make a living, and the house-rent alone is six dol- lars a month ; but still one lives, and does not fare so ill either. As it does not seem to be in her to dislike any one, it must be out of a harmless guile, felt to be comforting to servant-ridden householders, that she always speaks of " those Irish," her neigh- bors, with a bated breath, a shaken head, a hand lifted to the cheek, and an averted countenance. Swarthiest of the organ-grinding tribe is he who peers up at my window out of infinitesimal black eyes, perceives me, louts low, and for form's sake grinds me out a tune before he begins to talk. As Ave parley together, say it is eleven o'clock in the forenoon, and a sober tranquillity reigns upon the dust and noddino; weeds of Benicia Street. At that hour the organ-grinder and I are the only persons of our sex in the whole suburban population ; all other husbands and fathers having eaten their break- fasts at seven o'clock, and stood up in the early horse-cars to Boston, whence they will return, with aching backs and quivering calves, half-pendant by leathern straps from the roofs of the same luxurious conveyances, in the evening. The Italian might go and grind his organ upon the front stoop of any one of a hundred French-roof houses around, and there would be no arm within strono- enouMi to thrust him thence ; but he is a gentleman in his way, and, as he prettily explains, he never stops to play except where the window smiles on him : a frowning lattice 48 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. he will pass in silence. I behold in him a disap-« pointed man, — a man broken in health, and of a liver baked by long sojourn in a tropical clime. In large and dim outline, made all the dimmer by his dialect, he sketches me tlie story of his life ; how in his youth he ran away from the Milanese for love of a girl in France, who, dying, left him with so little purpose in the world that, after working at his trade of plasterer for some years in Lyons, he lis- tened to a certain gentleman going out upon govern- ment service to a French colony in South America. This gentleman wanted a man-servant, and he said to my organ-grinder, " Go with me and I make your fortune." So he, who cared not whither he went, went, and found himself in the tropics. It was a hard life he led there ; and of the wages that had seemed so great in France, he paid nearly half to his laundress alone, being forced to be neat in his master's house. The service was not so irksome in-doors, but it was the hunting beasts in the forest all day that broke his patience at last. " Beasts in the forest ? " I ask, forgetfrJ of the familiar sense of bestie, and figuring cougars at least by the word. " Yes, those little beasts for the natui-alists, — flies, bugs, beetles, — Heaven knows what." " But this brought you money ? " " It brought my master money, but me aches and pains as many as you will, and at last the fever. When that was burnt out, I made up my mind to ask for more pay, and, not getting it, to quit that DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 49 service. I think the signer would have given it, — but the signora ! So I left, empty as I came, and was cook on a vessel to Ncav York." This was the black and white of the man's story. I lose the color and atmosphere which his manner as well as his words bestowed upon it. He told it in a cheerful, impersonal kind of way as the romance of a poor devil which had interested him, and might possibly amuse me, leaving out no touch of character in his portrait of the fat, selfish master, — yielding enough, however, but for his grasping wife, who, with all her avarice and greed, he yet confessed to be very handsome. By the wave of a hand he hoiised them in a tropic residence, dim, cool, close shut, kept by servants in white linen moving with mute slippered feet over stone floors ; and by another gesture he indicated the fierce thorny growths of the forest in which he hunted those vivid insects, — the luxuriant savannas, the gigantic ferns and palms, the hush and shining desolation, the presence of the invisible fever and death. There was a touch, too, of inexpressible sadness in his half-ignorant mention of the exiles at Cayenne, who were forbidden the wide ocean of escape about them by those swift gun- boats keeping their coasts and swooping down upon every craft that left the shore. He himself had seen one such capture, and he made me see it, and the mortal despair of the fugitives, standing upright in their boat with the idle oars in their unconscious hands, while the corvette swept toward them. For all his misfortunes, he was not cast down. 4 50 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. He had that lightness of temper which seems proper to most northern Italians, whereas those from the south are usually dark-mooded, sad-faced men. Nothing -surpasses for unstudied misanthropy of expression the visages of different Neapolitan harpers who have visited us ; but they have some right to their dejected countenances as being of a yet half- civilized stock, and as real artists and men of genius. Nearly all wandering violinists, as well as harpers, are of their race, and they are of every age, from that of mere children to men in their prime. They are very rarely old, as many of the organ-grinders are ; they are not so handsome as the Italians of the north, though they have invariably fine eyes. They arrive in twos and threes ; the violinist briefly tunes his fiddle, and tlie harper unslings his instrument, and, with faces of profound gloom, they go through their repertory, — pieces from the great composers, airs from the opera, not unmingled with such efforts of Anglo-Saxon genius as Champagne Charley and Captain Jenks of the Horse Marines, which, like the language of Shakespeare and Milton, hold us and our English cousins in tender bonds of mutual affec- tion. Beyond the fact that they come " dal Basili- cat'," or " dal Principat','' one gets very little out of these Neapolitans, though I dare say they are not so surly at heart as they look. Money does not brighten them to the eye, but yet it touches them, ^nd they are good in playing or leaving off to him that pays. Long time two of them stood between the gateway firs on a pleasant summer's afternoon, DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 51 and twanged and scraped their harmonious strings, till all the idle boys of the neighborhood gathered about them, listening with a grave and still delight. It was a most serious company : the Neapolitans, with their cloudy brows, rapt in their music ; and the Yankee children, with their impassive faces, warily guarding against the faintest expression of enjoy- ment; and when at last the minstrels played a brisk measure, and the music began to work in the blood of the boys, and one of them shuffling his reluctant feet upon the gravel, broke into a sudden and resist- less dance, the spectacle became too sad for con- templation. The boy danced only from the hips down ; no expression of his face gave the levity sanction, nor did any of hi^ comrades : they beheld him with a silent fascination, but none was infected by the solemn indecorum ; and when the legs and music ceased their play together, no comment was made, and the dancer turned unheated away. A chance passer asked for what he called the Geary- baldeye Hymn, but the Neapolitans apparently did not know what this was. My doorstep acquaintance were not all of one race ; now and then an alien to the common Italian tribe appeared, — an Irish soldier, on his way to Salem, and willing to show me more of his mutilation than I cared to buy the sight of for twenty-five cents ; and more rarely yet an American, also formerly of the army, but with something besides his wretched- ness to sell. On the hottest day of last summer such a one rang the bell, and was discovered on the thresh- 52 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. old wiping with his poor sole hand the sweat that stood upon his forehead. There was still enough of the independent citizen in his maimed and emaciated person to inspire him with deliberation and a show of that indifference with which we Americans like to encounter each other ; but his voice was rather faint when he asked if I supposed we wanted any starch to-day. " Yes, certainly," answered what heart there was within, taking note willfully, but I hope not wantonly, wlxat an absurdly limp figure he Avas for a peddler of starch, — "certainly from you, brave fellow;" and the package being taken from his basket, the man turned to go away, so very wearily, that a cheap phi- lanthropy protested : " For shame ! ask him to sit down in-doors and drink a glass of water." " No," answered the poor fellow, when this indig- nant voice had been obeyed, and he had been taken at a disadvantage, and as it were surprised into the confession, " my family hadn't any breakfast this morning, and I've got to hurry back to them." " Haven't you had any breakfast ? " " Well, I wa'n't rightly hungry when I left the house." " Here, now," popped in the virtue before named, " is an opportunity to discharge the debt we all owe to the brave fellows who gave us back our country. Make it beer." So it was made beer and bread and cold meat, and, after a little pressing, the honest soul consented to the refreshment. He sat down in a cool doorway, DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 53 and began to eat and to tell of the fight before Vicksburg. And if you have never seen a one- armed soldier making a meal, I can assure you the sight is a pathetic one, and is rendered none the cheerfaller by his memories of the fights that muti- lated him. This man had no very susceptible audi- ence, but before he was carried off the field, shot through the body, and in the arm and foot, he had sold every package of starch in his basket. I am ashamed to say this now, for I suspect that a man with one arm, who indulged liimself in going about under that broiling sun of July, peddling starch, was very probably an impostor. He computed a good day's profits of seventy-five cents, and when asked if that was not very little for the support of a sick wife and three children, he answered with a quaint effort at impressiveness, and with a trick, as I im- agined, from the manner of the regimental chaplain, " You've done your duty, my friend, and more'n your duty. If every one did their duty like that, we should get along." So he took leave, and shambled out into the furnace-heat, the sun beating upon his pale face, and his linen coat hugging him close, but with his basket lighter, and I hope his heart also. At any rate, this was the sentiment which cheap phi- lanthropy offered in self-gratulation, as he passed out of sight : " There ! you are quits with those maimed soldiers at last, and you have a country which you have paid for with cold victvmls as they with blood." We have been a good deal visited by one dis- banded volunteer, not to the naked eye maimed, nor 54 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. apparently suffering from any lingering illness, yei who bears, as he tells me, a secret disabling wound in his side from a spent shell, and who is certainly a prey to the most acute form of shiftlessness. I do not recall with exactness the date of our acquaint- ance, but it was one of those pleasant August after- noons when a dinner eaten in peace fills the di- gester with a millennial tenderness for the race too rarely felt in the nineteenth century. At such a moment it is a more natural action to loosen than to tighten the purse-strings, and when a very neatly dressed young man presented himself at the gate, and, in a note of indescribable plaintiveness, asked if I had any little job for him to do that he might pay for a night's lodging, I looked about the small domain with a vague longing to find some part of it in disrepair, and experienced a moment's absurd relief when he hinted that he would be willing to accept fifty cents in pledge of future service. Yet this was not the right principle : some work, real or apparent, must be done for the money, and the veteran was told that he might weed the strawberry bed, though, as matters then stood, it was clean enough for a strawberry bed that never bore any- thing. The veteran was neatly dressed, as I have said : his coat, which was good, was buttoned to the throat for reasons that shall be sacred against curios- ity, and he had on a perfectly clean paper collar ; he was a handsome young fellow, with regular features, and a solicitously kept imperial and mustache ; his hair, when he lifted his hat, appeared elegantly oiled DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 55 and brushed. I did not hope from this figure that the work done would be worth the money paid, and, as nearly as I can compute, the weeds he took from that bed cost me «, cent apiece, to say nothing of a cup of tea given him in grace at the end of his labors. My acquaintance was, as the reader will be glad to learn, a native American, though it is to be re- gretted, for the sake of facts which his case went far to establish, that he was not a New-Englander by birth. The most that could be claimed M'as, that he came to Boston from Delaware when very young, and that there on that brine-washed granite he had grown as perfect a flower of helplessness and indo- lence, as fine a fruit of maturing civilization, as ever expanded or ripened in Latin lands. He lived, not only a protest in flesh and blood against the tendency of democracy to exclude mere beauty from our sys- tem, but a refutation of those Old World observers, who denv to our vulgar and bustlinii communities the refining and elevating gi'ace of Repose. There was something very curious and original in his character, from which the sentiment of shame was absent, but which was not lacking in the fine in- stincts of personal cleanliness, of dress, of style. There was nothing of the rowdy in him ; he was gentle as an Italian noble in his manners : what other traits they may have had in common, I do not know ; perhaps an amiable habit of illusion. He was always going to bring me his discharge papers, but he never did, though he came often and had 56 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. many a pleasant night's sleep at my cost. If some- times he did a little work, he spent great part of the time contracted to me in the kitchen, where it was understood, quite upon his own agency, that his wages included board. At other times, he called for money too late in the evening to work it out that day, and it has happened that a new second girl, deceived by his genteel appearance in the uncertain light, has shown him into the parlor, where I have found him to his and my own great amusement, as the gentleman who wanted to see me. Nothing else seemed to raise his ordinarily dejected spirits so much. We all know how pleasant it is to laugh at people be- hind their backs ; but this veteran affoi'ded me at a very low rate the luxury of a fellow-being whom one mi^ht lauo-h at to his face as much as one liked. Yet with all his shamelessness, his pensiveness, his elegance, I felt that somehow our national triumph was not complete in him, — that there were yet more finished forms of self-abasement in the Old World, till one day I looked out of the window and saw at a little distance my veteran digging a cellar for an Irishman. I own that the spectacle gave me a shock of })leasure, and that I ran down to have a nearer view of what human eyes have seldom, if ever, be- held, — an American, pure blood, handling the pick, the shovel, and the wheelbarrow, while an Irishman directed his labors. Upon inspection, it appeared that none of the trees grew with their roots in the air, in recognition of this great reversal of the natural law ; all the French-roof houses stood rio;ht DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 57 side up. The phenomenon may become more com- mon in future, unless the American race accom- plishes its destiny of dying out before the more pop- ulatory foreigner, but as yet it graced the veteran with an exquisite and signal distinction. He, how- ever, seemed to feel unpleasantly the anomaly of his case, and opened the conversation by saying that he should not work at that job to-morrow, it hurt his side ; and went on to complain of the inhumanity of Americans to Americans. "Why," said he, "they'd rather give out their jobs to a nigger than to one of their own kind. I was beatin' carpets for a gentle- man on the Avenue, and the first thing I know he give most of 'em to a nigger. I beat seven of 'em in one day, and got two dollars ; and the nigger beat 'em by the piece, and he got a dollar an' a half apiece. My luck ! " Here the Irishman glanced at his hireling, and the rueful veteran hastened to pile up another wheel- barrow with earth. If ever we come to reverse positions generally with our Irish brethren, there is no doubt but they will get more work out of us than we do fi-om them at present. It was shortly after this that the veteran offered to do second girl's work in my house if I Avould take him. The place was not vacant ; and as the sum- mer was now drawing to a close, and I feared to be left with him on my hands for the winter, it seemed well to speak to him upon the subject of economy. The next time he called, I had not about me the exact sum for a night's lodging, — fifty cents, namelv, 58 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. — and asked him if he thought a dollar would do He smiled sadly, as if he did not like jesting upon such a very serious subject, but said he allowed to work it out, and took it. " Now, I hope you won't think I am interfering with your affairs," said his benefactor, " but I really think you are a very poor financier. According to your own account, you have been going on from year to year for a long time, trusting to luck for a night's lodging. Sometimes I suppose you have to sleep out-of-doors." " No, never ! " answered the veteran, Avith some- thing like scorn. " I never sleep out-doors. I wouldn't do it." " Well, at any rate, some one has to pay for your lodging. Don't you think you'd come cheaper to your friends, if, instead of going to a hotel every night, you'd take a room somewhere, and pay for it by the month? " " I've thought of that. If I could get a good bed, I'd try it awhile anyhow. You see the hotels have raised. I used to get a lodgin' and a nice breakfast for a half a dollar, but now it is as much as you can do to get a lodgin' for the money, and it's just as dear in the Port as it is in the city. I've tried hotels pretty much everywhere, and one's about as bad as another." If he had been a travelled Englishman writing a book, he could not have spoken of hotels with greater disdain. " You see, the trouble with me is, I ain't got any DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE. 59 relations around here. Now," he added, with the life and eagerness of an inspiration, " if I had a mother and sister Hvin' down at the Port, say, I wouldn't go hunting about for these mean little jobs everywheres. I'd just lay round home, and wait till something come up big. What I want is a home." At the instigation of a malignant spirit I asked the homeless orphan, " Why don't you get married, then?" He gave me another smile, sadder, fainter, sweeter than before, and said : " When would you like to see me again, so I could work out this dollar? " A sudden and unreasonable disg-ust for the charac- ter which had given me so much entertainment suc- ceeded to my past delight. I felt, moreover, that I had bought the rio-ht to use some frankness with the veteran, and I said to him : " Do you know now, I shouldn't care if I never saw you again ? " I can only conjecture that he took the confidence in good part, for he did not appear again after that. A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. Walking for walking's sake I do not like. The diversion appears to me one of the most factitious of modern enjoyments ; and I cannot help looking ujDon those who pace their five miles in the teeth of a north wind, and profess to come home all the live- lier and better for it, as guilty of a venial hypocrisy. It is in nature that after such an exercise the bones should ache and the flesh tremble ; and I suspect that these harmless pretenders are all the while pay- ing a secret penalty for their bravado. With a pleasant end in view, or with cheerful companion- ship, walking is far from being the worst thing in life ; though doubtless a truly candid person must confess that he would rather ride under the same circumstances. Yet it is certain that some sort of .recreation is necessary after a day spent within doors ; and one is really obliged nowadays to take a little walk instead of medicine ; for one's doctor is sure to have a mania on the subject, and there is no more getting pills or powders out of him for a slight indi- gestion than if they had all • been shot away at the rebels during the war. For this reason I sometimes go upon a pedestrian tour, which is of no great ex- tent in itself, and which I moi-eover modify by keep- ing always within sound of the horse-car bells, or easy reach of some steam-car station. A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 61 I fear that I should find these rambles dull, but that their utter lack of interest amuses me. I will be honest with the reader, though, and any Master Pliable is fi'ee to forsake me at this point ; for I cannot promise to be really livelier than my walk. There is a Slough of Despond in full view, and not a Delectable Mountain to be seen, unless you choose so to call the high lands about Waltham, which we shall behold dark blue against the western sky pres- ently. As I sally forth upon Benicia Street, the whole suburb of Charlesbridge stretches about me, — a vast space upon which I can embroider any fancy I like as I saunter along. I have no associa- tions with it, or memories of it, and, at some seasons, I might wander for days in the most frequented parts of it, and meet hardly any one I know. It is not, however, to these parts that I commonly turn, but northward, up a street upon which a flight of French- roof houses suddenly settled a year or two since, with families in them, and many outward signs of per- manence, though their precipitate arrival might cast some doubt upon this. I have to admire their uni- form neatness and prettiness, and I look at their dormer-windows with the envy of one to whose weak' sentimentality dormer-windows long appeared the supreme architectural happiness. But, for all my admiration of the houses, I find a variety that is pleasanter in the landscape, when I reach, beyond them, a little bridge which appears to span a small stream. It unites banks lined with a growth of trees and briers nodding their heads above the neiMiborino- 62 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. levels, and suggesting a quiet water-course ; though in fact it is the Fitchburg Railroad that purls be- tween them, with rippling freight and passenger trains and ever-gurgling locomotives. The banks take the earliest green of spring upon their south- ward slope, and on a Sunday morning of May, when the bells are lamenting the Sabbaths of the past, I find their sunny tranquillity sufficient to give me a slight heart-ache for I know not what. If I descend them and follow the railroad westward half a mile, I come to vast brick-yards, which are not in them- selves exciting to the imagination, and which yet, from an irresistible association of ideas, remind me of Egypt, and are forever newly forsaken of those who made bricks without straw ; so that I have no " trouble in erecting temples and dynastic tombs out of the kilns ; while the mills for grinding the clay serve me very well for those sad-voiced sakias or wheel-pumps which the Howadji Curtis heard wail- inor at their work of drawino; water from the Nile. A little farther on I come to the boarding-house built at the railroad side for the French Canadians who have by this time succeeded the Hebrews in the toil of the brick-yards, and who, as they loiter in windy-voiced, good-humored groups about the doors of their lodgings, insist upon bringing before me the town of St. Michel at the mouth of the great Mont Cenis tunnel, where so many peasant folk like them are always amiably quarreling before the cabarets when the diligence comes and goes. Somewhere, there must be a gendarme with a cocked hat and a A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 63 sword on, standing with folded arms to represent the Empire and Peace amono; that rural population ; if I looked in-doors, I am sui'e 1 should see the neatest of landladies and landladies' daughters and nieces in high black silk caps, bearing hither and thither smoking bowls of bouillon and cafe-au-lait. Well, it takes as little to make one happy as miserable, thank Heaven ! and I derive a cheerfulness from this scene which quite atones to me for the fleeting desolation suffered from the sunny verdure on the railroad bank. With repaired spirits I take my way up through the brick-yards towards the Irish settlement on the north, passing under the long sheds that sliel- ter the kilns. The ashes lie cold about the mouths of most, and the bricks are burnt to the proper com- plexion ; in others these are freshly arranged over flues in Avhich the fire has not been kindled ; but in whatever state I see them, I am reminded of brick- kilns of boyhood. They were then such palaces of enchantment as any architect should now vainly at- tempt to rival with bricks upon the most desirable corner lot of the Back Bay, and were the homes of men truly to be envied : men privileged to stay up all night ; to sleep, as it were, out of doors ; to hear the wild geese as they flew over in the darkness ; to be waking in time to shoot the early ducks that visited the neighboring ponds ; to roast corn upon the ends of sticks ; to tell and to listen to stories that never ended, save in some sudden impulse to rise and dance a happy hoe-down in the ruddy light of the kiln-fires. If by day they were seen to have the redness of 64 SUBURBAN SKETCHES. eyes of men that looked upon the whiskey when it was yellow and gave its color in the flask ; if now and then the fragments of a broken bottle strewed the scene of their vigils, and a head broken to match appeared among those good comrades, the boyish imagination was not shocked by these things, but accepted them merely as the symbols of a free virile life. Some such life no doubt is still to be found in the Dublin to which I am come by the time my re- pertory of associations with brick-kilns is exhausted ; but, oddly enough, I no longer care to encounter it. It is perhaps in a pious recognition of our mortality that Dublin is built around the Irish grave-yard. Most of its windows look out upon the sepulchral monuments and the pretty constant arrival of the funeral trains with their long- lines of carriages bringino; to the celebration of the sad ultimate rites those gay companies of Irish mourners. I suppose that the spectacle of such obsequies is not at all de- pressing to the inhabitants of Dublin ; but that, on the contrary, it must beget in them a feeling which, if not resignation to death, is, at least, a sort of sub- acute cheerfulness in his presence. None but a Dubliner, however, would have been greatly ani- mated by a scene which I witnessed during a stroll through this cemetery one afternoon of early spring. The fact that a marble slab or shaft more or less sculptured, and inscribed with words more or less .helpless, is the utmost that we can give to one whom once we could caress with every tenderness of speech and touch ; and that, after all, the memorial we raise Lcicjkiiii;- ab