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 low
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....