Bohemian Days: Three American Tales

by George Alfred Townsend

"Yes, mammy," answered the girl; "it's safer standing in market with catfish. He! he! he!"

A shipbuilder's daughter was on the front steps, a slender girl of dark, smooth skin and features, talking to a grown boy. The girl bowed: "How do you do, Miss Agnes?" The grown boy giggled inanely.

Two old women, near neighbors of Agnes, had their spectacles wiped and run out to a proper focus, and the older of the two had a double pair upon her most insidious and suspicious nose. As Agnes passed, this old lady gave such a start that she dropped the spectacles off her nose, and ejaculated through the open window, "Lord alive!"

At Knox Van de Lear's house the fine-bodied, feline lady with nictitating eyes, drew aside the curtain, even while the dying man above was in frigid waters, that she might slowly raise and drop her ambrosial lids, and express a refined but not less marked surprise. Agnes, by an excitement of the nerves of apprehension, saw everything while she trembled. She could read the dates of all the houses on the painted cornices of the water-spouts, and saw the cabalistic devices of old insurance companies on the property they covered. Pigeons flying about the low roofs clucked and chuckled as if their milky purity had been incensed, and little dogs seemed to draw near and trot after, too familiarly, as if they scented sin.

There were two working-men from Zane & Rainey's ship-yard who had known kindness to their wives from Agnes when those wives were in confinement. Both took off their hats respectfully, but with astonishment overwhelming their pity.

Half the fire company had congregated at one corner of the street—lean, runners of men in red shirts, and with boots outside their trousers. They did not say a word, but gazed as at a riddle going by. Yet at one place a Sabbath scholar of Agnes came out before her, and, making a courtesy, said:

"Teacher, take my orange blossom!"

The flower was nearly white, and very fragrant. Duff Salter reached out and put it in his button-hole.

So excited were the sensibilities of Agnes that it seemed to her the old door-knockers squinted; the idle writing of boys on dead walls read with a hidden meaning; the shade-trees lazily shaking in summer seemed to whisper; if she looked down, there now and then appeared, moulded in the bricks of the pavement, a worn letter, or a passing goose foot, the accident of the brickyard, but now become personal and intentional. The little babies, sporting in their carriages before some houses, leaned forward and looked as wise and awful as doctors in some occult diagnosis. Cartwheels, as they struck hard, articulated, "What, out! Boo! boohoo!" Sunshine all slanted her way. Hucksters' cries sounded like constables' proclamation: "Oyez! oyez!"

With the perceptions, the reflections of Agnes were also startlingly alert. She seemed two or three unfortunate people at once. Now it was Lady Jane Grey going to the tower. Now it was Beatrice Cenci going to torture. Now it was Mary Magdalene going to the cross. At almost every house she felt a kindness speak for her, except mankind; a recollection of nursing, comforting, praying with some one, but all forgotten now. "Via Crucia, Via Crucia," her thorn-torn feet seemed to patter in the echoes of her ears and mind, and there arose upon her spirit the sternest curse of women, direful with God's own rage, "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception."