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 master-stroke 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 out any. I wanted to go with you,
but I ought to knowed I couldn’t.
All is, I loved you too much.”
Vagabonds the world would no doubt call many of my
doorstep acquaintance, and I do not attempt to defend
them altogether against the world, which paints but
black and white and in general terms. Yet I would
fain veil what is only half-truth under another name,
for I know that the service of their Gay Science is
not one of such disgraceful ease as we associate with
ideas of vagrancy, though I must own that they lead
the life they do because they love it. They always
protest that nothing but their ignorance of our tongue
prevents them from practicing some mechanical trade.
“What work could be harder,” they ask,
“than carrying this organ about all day?”
but while I answer with honesty that nothing can be
more irksome, I feel that they only pretend a disgust
with it, and that they really like organ-grinding,
if for no other reason than that they are the children
of the summer, and it takes them into the beloved
open weather. One of my friends, at least, who
in the warmer months is to all appearance a blithesome
troubadour, living
“A merry life in sun and shade,”
