“Oh, does it, Uncle Teddy? They never got a cent of it. One time I was good so long I got scared. I was afraid I'd never want to fly my kite on a roof again or go anywhere where I oughtn't, or have any fun. I couldn't see any use of going and saving my money to send out to the Objecks if it was going to make good boys of 'em. It was awful hard for me to have to be a good boy, and it must be worse for them 'cause they ain't used to it. So when there wasn't anybody upstairs I went and shook a lot of pennies out of my chimney and bought ever so much taffy and marbles and popcorn. Was that awful mean, Uncle Teddy?”
The question involved such complications that I hesitated. Before I could decide what to answer Billy continued:
“Ma said it was robbing the heathen, and didn't I get it? I thought if it was robbing I'd have a cop after me.”
“What's a 'cop'?”
“That's what the boys call a policeman, Uncle Teddy; and then I should be taken away and put in an awful black place underground, like Johnny Wilson when he broke Mrs. Perkins's window. I was scared, I tell you. But I didn't get anything worse than a whipping, and having my savings bank taken away from me with all that was left in it, I haven't tried to be good since, much.”
We now got into a Broadway stage going down, and being unable, on account of the noise, to converse further upon those spiritual conflicts of Billy's which so much interested me, we amused ourselves with looking out until just as we reached the Astor House, when he asked me where we were going.
“Where do you guess?” said I.
He cast a glance through the front window and his face became irradiated. Oh, there's nothing like the simple, cheap luxury of pleasing a child, to create sunshine enough for the chasing away of the bluest adult devils!
“We're going to Barnum's,” said Billy, involuntarily clapping his hands.
So we were; and, much as stuck-up people pretend to look down at the place, I frequently am. Not only so, but I always see that class largely represented there when I do go. To be sure, they always make believe that they only come to amuse the children, or because their country cousins visit them; and never fail to refer to the vulgar set one finds there, and the fact of the animals smelling like anything but Jockey Club; yet I notice that after they've been in the hall three minutes they're as much interested as any of the people they come to poh-poh, and only put on the high-bred air when they fancy some of their own class are looking at them. I boldly acknowledge that I go because I like it. I am especially happy, to be sure, if I have a child along to go into ecstasies and give me a chance, by asking questions, for the exhibition of that fund of information which is said to be one of my chief charms in the social circle, and on several occasions has led that portion of the public immediately about the Happy Family into the erroneous impression that I was Mr. Barnum explaining his five hundred thousand curiosities. On the present occasion we found several visitors of the better class in the room devoted to the Aquarium. Among these was a young lady, apparently about nineteen, in a tight-fitting basque of black velvet, which showed her elegant figure to fine advantage, a skirt of garnet silk, looped up over a pretty Balmoral, and the daintiest imaginable pair of kid walking-boots. Her height was a trifle over the medium, her eyes, a soft expressive brown, shaded by masses of hair which exactly matched their color, and, at that rat-and-miceless day, fell in such graceful abandon as to show at once that nature was the only maid who crimped their waves into them. Her complexion was rosy with health and sympathetic enjoyment; her mouth was faultless, her nose sensitive, her manners full of refinement, and her voice musical as a wood-robin's, when she spoke to the little boy of six at her side, to whom she was revealing the palace of the great show-king. Billy and I were flattening our noses against the abode of the balloon-fish and determining whether he looked most like a horse-chestnut burr or a ripe cucumber, when his eyes and my own simultaneously fell on the child and lady. In a moment, to Billy the balloon-fish was as though he had not been.