Harry Fenimore's Principles

by Isabel Thompson Hopkins

Sue had nodded assent, and a queer little bit of humanity, half standing, half sitting, quite unnoticed, in one of the queer old windows, had nodded too, but not for himself. He could not suppose she meant to include him.

“All but me!” he added to himself; that was what he always said, and somehow it never did seem as if anything was intended for him. The women had not noticed him, partly because he was so small, his great, dreamy eyes looking over at them from a point hardly higher than the window-sill, and partly because no one ever noticed Creepy further than to speak a kind word, or to manage some little thing that he thought might go towards his comfort. He came and went as he liked, but so noiselessly that the gaze of his great eyes, devouring everything from one corner to another, made the new-comers start, until they were used to it, and found out at last that it was only “the poor crooked thing,” as Mrs. Ganderby the matron called him—the stray child with the crooked back, whom no one had ever claimed or ever would.

No one ever asked any work of Creepy, and indeed it seemed doubtful whether anything would ever be found for those white hands, so like a baby’s in their powerless touch; and it was not always certain, after all, that one would meet him here or there about the house. There were days and weeks together when he was only able to sit where some one placed his chair; in summer oftenest under the shade of the old butternut, and in winter by some one of the queer little windows where the sun could lie the longest. Old Enoch had made the chair for him, and a most remarkable specimen of handicraft it was.

“Does credit to your head and heart, Enoch,” said the doctor when he saw it.

Enoch took off his hat and made the best bow his rheumatism would allow; but pleasant as it was to receive a compliment from the doctor, even that could not add to his pride in his work.

“Thanks,” he said. “In course I ought to know my business, for ’twas the best master-workman in the country round I was ’prenticed to, and ’twas more than forty year my work was called a match to his, far and near, and would have been yet to this day, if a fall from the big steeple hadn’t brought me down to stiff joints for the rest of my old age. Ben had a great deal to say about gardening, to be sure, but what good would people get out of potatoes to put in their mouths if they had not a shelter over their heads? I should like to ask. And Ben was always making it such a thing to remember that the blessed Lord called himself a husbandman when He was here; but was He not a carpenter first and foremost, and before he even talked a word about sowing seed?”

Ah! “blessed Lord” indeed! Who else could have made poverty and work seem sweet?

So there sat Creepy, always looking and listening, never saying anything about the pain in his crooked little back, even when it was at the worst; never saying much about anything, in fact, only nodding and smiling quietly while he listened to the rest. Except, to be sure, the one little thing that he was always saying, the same that he had said in Ben’s room; but even that was almost always whispered to himself.

“All but me!”

And indeed it did not seem that many things were intended to include Creepy. The other paupers had their times of getting new clothing allowed, but it was never considered necessary for Creepy; the matron always found some portion of some cast-off garment that had resisted wear and tear sufficiently to be brought round again, by her devices, into the right size and shape for “the poor crooked thing,” as she always called him; “it took such a scrap,” she used to say, “though dear knows it had been a precious job to worry out a pattern for such a back and shoulders. She didn’t know whose wit and patience would ever have done it but her own.”