“No; forget all about that and call him James.”
“When we have anything good, and when we find a bumblebee’s nest, shall we give him part, just like we do each other?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Whitman sent for Sally Wood, one of her neighbor’s daughters, to take care of the milk and do the housework; and then set herself to altering over a suit of her husband’s clothes to fit James, who, clean from head to foot, sat with his leg in a chair watching Mrs. Whitman at her work, but the greater portion of the time asleep.
“Let him sleep,” she said; “‘twill do him good to sleep a week; he’ll come to his feeling after that and be another boy. It’s the full meals and the finding out what disposition is to be made of him, and that he’s not to be hurt, makes him sleep. I doubt if he had any too much to eat on the passage over.”
By night the good woman, with the aid of Sally (who, besides doing the work, found some time to sew), had prepared a strong, well-fitting suit of working-clothes and a linsey-woolsey shirt, and, after supper, James put them on. He made no remark in relation to his clothes, but Maria reported that she knew he was as pleased as he could be, because she peeped into the door of the bedroom and saw him looking at himself in the glass and counting the buttons on his waistcoat and jacket.
James improved rapidly, and began in a few days to walk around the door-yard and to the barn, and sit by the hour in the sun on the wood-pile (with Fowler at his feet, for the dog had taken a great liking to him), insomuch that Mrs. Whitman asked her husband if it would not make him better contented to have some light work that he could do sitting down.
“Not yet, wife. I want to see if, when he finds us all at work, he won’t start of his own accord. He has no more idea of earning anything, or of labor in our sense of that word, than my speckled ox has. When I hold up the end of the yoke and tell old Buck to come under, he comes; and so this boy has been put out to hard masters who stood over and got all out of him they could. He has never had reason to suppose that there are any people in this world that care anything about others, except to get all they can out of them.”
“If, as you say, he has always had a task-master, perhaps he thinks because we don’t tell him what to do, that we don’t want him to do anything.”
“We’ll let the thing work; I want to see what he’ll do of his own accord before I interfere. It is my belief that, benumbed as he now appears, there’s enterprise in him, and that the right kind of treatment will bring it out; but I want it to come naturally just as things grow out of the ground. He’s had a surfeit of the other kind of treatment.”