relation. She advised freely with us upon all household matters, and took
a motherly interest in whatever concerned us. She could be flattered or
caressed into almost any service, but no threat or command could move her.
When she erred, she never acknowledged her wrong in words, but handsomely
expressed her regrets in a pudding, or sent up her apologies in a favorite
dish secretly prepared. We grew so well used to this form of exculpation,
that, whenever Mrs. Johnson took an afternoon at an inconvenient season,
we knew that for a week afterwards we should be feasted like princes. She
owned frankly that she loved us, that she never had done half so much for
people before, and that she never had been nearly so well suited in any
other place; and for a brief and happy time we thought that we never
should part.

One day, however, our dividing destiny appeared in the basement, and was
presented to us as Hippolyto Thucydides, the son of Mrs. Johnson, who had
just arrived on a visit to his mother from the State of New Hampshire. He
was a heavy and loutish youth, standing upon the borders of boyhood, and
looking forward to the future with a vacant and listless eye. I mean that
this was his figurative attitude; his actual manner, as he lolled upon a
chair beside the kitchen window, was so eccentric, that we felt a little
uncertain how to regard him, and Mrs. Johnson openly described him as
peculiar. He was so deeply tanned by the fervid suns of the New Hampshire
winter, and his hair had so far suffered from the example of the sheep
lately under his charge, that he could not be classed by any stretch of
compassion with the blonde and straight-haired members of Mrs. Johnson's
family.

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,