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 pastures, 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 corn-fields 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 hang-dog 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. She used to rehearse
us long epics concerning his industry, his courage, and his talent; and
she put fine speeches in his mouth with no more regard to the truth than
if she had been a historian, and not a poet. Perhaps she believed that he
really said and did the things she attributed to him: it is the destiny of
those who repeatedly tell great things either of themselves or others; and