The others joined in. "Hur-ray!" cried the nine small companions of Ivan. He looked at them for a moment, his thin mouth twitching. They were glad, too, then, that he was to stay! He walked straight to Miss Clarkson, buried his face in her lap, and burst into tears. For a moment she held him close, smoothing his black head with a tender hand. Almost immediately he straightened himself and returned to the side of Josephine, shy, shamefaced, but smiling again—a new Ivan.
"What did you cry for?" demanded that young lady, obtusely. "Because you feel bad?"
Augustus Adolphus replied for his friend, with an insight beyond his years.
"You let him alone," he said, severely. "He don't never cry when he feels bad; he only cries when he feels good!"
VII
IN MEMORY OF HANNAH'S LAUGH
His name was "'Rastus Calhoun Breckenridge," he announced the morning that he began his new duties as janitor of the Adelaide apartments, and he at once gave the tenants to understand that no liberties were to be taken with it. He preferred it all when he was addressed in ordinary conversation, he explained to them, but he had no objections to the title, "Mistah Breckenridge," when they felt hurried. This interested every inmate of the Adelaide, and for a few days amazingly amused several, who gave play to their fancy in the use of abbreviations which struck them as humorous. Their jokes lost point, subsequently, when it was discovered that on no occasion did "Mistah Breckenridge" respond to their calls nor meet their demands—whereas his service to all others was swift, expert, phenomenally perfect. Thereafter the jokers forswore indulgence of their sense of humor and addressed the janitor at full length and with fuller deference, to reap their reward with those whose apartments were warm, whose reasonable requests were met, whose halls were clean, and whose door-knobs shone even as the rare smile of "Mistah Breckenridge" himself.
It required no unusual powers of observation to discover that as a janitor the new man was the rare and perfect specimen who keeps alive in a chilly world the tender plant of faith. Long before the sun was up his busy mop and broom were heard in the land, and the slip-slap of his carpet slippers, flopping along the halls as he made his nightly round, was the lullaby of dissipated souls who "retired" at eleven. Results followed with gratifying promptness. Apartments long empty were soon rented, and envious neighbors came to gaze in awe upon the Adelaide and its presiding genius, beholding in it the fine essence of New England neatness and in him a small, thin, nervous, insignificant-looking "colored gemman," who gazed past the sides of their faces with cold aloofness. Often, neighbors, passing the impressive entrance, heard from the lower regions of the building the sound of a high chuckle, deepening rapidly to a contralto gurgle, and then broadening out into a long, rich, velvety laugh as smooth as a flowing stream. No one could hear that laugh unmoved. It rippled, it lilted, it died away, and rolled forth again until the most blase listener smiled in sympathy, and children in the streets haw-hawed in mindless glee. It was the laugh of Hannah—Mrs. 'Rastus Calhoun Breckenridge, as her husband was careful to explain; and he once so far forgot his dignity as to add, expansively, "We got de stifkit dat prove hit, Hannah an' me. We got mah'd, real mah'd, by a pahson."
Hannah—stout, indolent, good-looking, good-natured, large enough to make two small persons like her husband—chuckled and gurgled into her fruity laugh.
"Dat's de mos' pahtickler man," she volunteered, artlessly. Then, seeing with wifely insight the first traces of gloom on her lord's brow, she winked, trembled like a jelly-fish in a fresh convulsion of her exhaustless mine of mirth, and disappeared into the lower regions, to which, it was said, her husband devoted much more housewifely care than she did. Usually he cooked his meals—and hers. Invariably he scrubbed and swept the floors.