But there were few quarrels of long standing between my foster parents. They were generally patched up with a drink or two. Then the wheel would turn again and produce exactly the same conditions as before.
One day, uncle, in a noble-minded effort to get away from temptation, told us that he had decided to board in another place, where he could live in peace. But aunt visited all the boarding-houses that she knew, finally found her husband in one at the North End, and scolded him so unmercifully, and unloaded so much weight of family history, that he came back to the South End with her on the car, took a pail, and brought back a quart of beer, and things went on as before.
After we had established our piano, and when uncle had become well acquainted with the spinners, he proposed to invite some of them with their wives for a “house-warming.”
The event occurred on a Saturday night. “Fatty” Dunding came, and brought an unknown woman with him, whom he tickled under the chin in play quite often, and told her that she was a “stunner in that new piece of hair, even better looking than in t’other lighter shade!” Tom Fellows, a tall man with a poetic face, brought his wife and child, a baby of seven months. There was a bass-voiced spinner named Marvin present, and he brought a roll of music with him.
“What hast’ got in, Stanny?” asked “Fatty.” “Summat to warm cockles o’ t’ ’eart?”
Uncle told him that there was half a barrel of beer in the cellar: that there were several bottles of port wine in the pantry, and that there was a taste of whiskey and a few softer drinks on hand.
By eight o’clock the program began to shape itself. Marvin undid his roll, at the first request, placed before my uncle a copy of “White Wings,” and asked, as the Hadfield bassoes had in the former days in the parlors of the “Linnet’s Nest,” and the “Blue Sign,” “Can t’ play it?”
And uncle responded, “Hum it o’er!” Marvin bent down his head as if in the act of telling a secret, hummed it over for a few bars, when uncle, after fingering with his chords, struck the pitch, and began to vamp gloriously.
“Wait till I play t’ introduction,” he said, and he hunched back, and confidently “introduced” the air to the satisfaction of all. Marvin sang “White Wings,” and after he had dampened his pipe with a noggin of whiskey, he asked uncle if he knew “I am a Friar of Orders Grey?”
Uncle said, again, “Hum it o’er.” When the introduction had been given, Marvin began a tumbling performance on the low notes that won great applause.