no doubt quite at home, looks as strange there as that pale anomaly which
may sometimes be seen among a crew of blackbirds.

An air not so much of decay as of unthrift, and yet hardly of unthrift,
seems to prevail in the neighborhood, which has none of the aggressive and
impudent squalor of an Irish quarter, and none of the surly wickedness of
a low American street. A gayety not born of the things that bring its
serious joy to the true New England heart--a ragged gayety, which comes of
summer in the blood, and not in the pocket or the conscience, and which
affects the countenance and the whole demeanor, setting the feet to some
inward music, and at times bursting into a line of song or a child-like
and irresponsible laugh--gives tone to the visible life, and wakens a very
friendly spirit in the passer, who somehow thinks there of a milder
climate, and is half persuaded that the orange-peel on the sidewalks came
from fruit grown in the soft atmosphere of those back courts.

It was in this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs. Johnson; and it was
from a colored boarding-house there that she came out to Charlesbridge to
look at us, bringing her daughter of twelve years with her. She was a
matron of mature age and portly figure, with a complexion like coffee
soothed with the richest cream; and her manners were so full of a certain
tranquillity and grace, that she charmed away all out will to ask for
references. It was only her barbaric laughter and her lawless eye that
betrayed how slightly her New England birth and breeding covered her
ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years of civilization
that lay between her race and ours. But in fact, she was doubly estranged
by descent; for, as we learned later, a sylvan wildness mixed with that of
the desert in her veins: her grandfather was an Indian, and her ancestors
on this side had probably sold their lands for the same value in trinkets
that bought the original African pair on the other side.