He was named John.
“A plain, sensible name,” said Miss Betty. “And while we are about it,” she added, “we may as well choose his surname. For a surname he must have, and the sooner it is decided upon the better.”
Miss Kitty had made a list of twenty-seven of her favorite Christian names which Miss Betty had sternly rejected, that everything might be plain, practical, and respectable at the outset of the tramp-child’s career. For the same reason she refused to adopt Miss Kitty’s suggestions for a surname.
“It’s so seldom there’s a chance of choosing a surname for anybody, sister,” said Miss Kitty, “it seems a pity not to choose a pretty one.”
“Sister Kitty,” said Miss Betty, “don’t be romantic. The boy is to be brought up in that station of life for which one syllable is ample. I should have called him Smith if that had not been Thomasina’s name. As it is, I propose to call him Broom. He was found under a bush of broom, and it goes very well with John, and sounds plain and respectable.”
So Miss Betty bought a Bible, and on the fly-leaf of it she wrote in her fine, round, gentlewoman’s writing—“John Broom. With good wishes for his welfare, temporal and eternal. From a sincere friend.” And when the inscription was dry the Bible was wrapped in brown paper, and put by in Thomasina’s trunk till John Broom should come to years of discretion.
He was slow to reach them, though in other respects he grew fast.
When he began to walk he would walk barefoot. To be out of doors was his delight, but on the threshold of the house he always sat down and discarded his shoes and stockings. Thomasina bastinadoed the soles of his feet with the soles of his shoes “to teach him the use of them,” so she said. But Miss Kitty sighed and thought of the lawyer’s prediction.
There was no blinking the fact that the child was as troublesome as he was pretty. The very demon of mischief danced in his black eyes, and seemed to possess his feet and fingers as if with quicksilver. And if, as Thomasina said, you “never knew what he would be at next,” you might also be pretty sure that it would be something he ought to have left undone.
John Broom early developed a taste for glass and crockery, and as the china cupboard was in that part of the house to which he by social standing also belonged, he had many chances to seize upon cups, jugs and dishes. If detected with anything that he ought not to have had, it was his custom to drop the forbidden toy and toddle off as fast as his unpractised feet would carry him. The havoc which this caused amongst the glass and china was bewildering in a household where tea-sets and dinner-sets had passed from generation to generation, where slapdash, giddy-pated kitchen-maids never came, where Miss Betty washed the best teacups in the parlor, where Thomasina was more careful than her mistress, and the breaking of a single plate was a serious matter, and if beyond riveting, a misfortune.