Mrs. Hopkins was delighted with the dignity and novelty of these two names, which were forthwith adopted. As they were rather long for common use in the family, they were shortened into the easier forms of Sossy and Minthy, under which designation the babes began very soon to thrive mightily, turning bread and milk into the substance of little sinners at a great rate, and growing as if they were put out at compound interest.
This short episode shows us the family conditions surrounding Byles Gridley, who, as we were saying, had just been called down to tea by Miss Susan Posey.
“I am coming, my dear,” he said,—which expression quite touched Miss Susan, who did not know that it was a kind of transferred caress from the delicious page he was reading. It was not the living child that was kissed, but the dead one lying under the snow, if we may make a trivial use of a very sweet and tender thought we all remember.
Not long after this, happening to call in at the lawyer's office, his eye was caught by the corner of a book lying covered up by a pile of papers. Somehow or other it seemed to look very natural to him. Could that be a copy of “Thoughts on the Universe”? He watched his opportunity, and got a hurried sight of the volume. His own treatise, sure enough! Leaves Uncut. Opened of itself to the one hundred and twentieth page. The axiom Murray Bradshaw had quoted—he did not remember from what,—“sounded like Coleridge”—was staring him in the face from that very page. When he remembered how he had pleased himself with that compliment the other day, he blushed like a school-girl; and then, thinking out the whole trick,—to hunt up his forgotten book, pick out a phrase or two from it, and play on his weakness with it, to win his good opinion,—for what purpose he did not know, but doubtless to use him in some way,—he grinned with a contempt about equally divided between himself and the young schemer.
“Ah ha!” he muttered scornfully. “Sounds like Coleridge, hey? Niccolo Macchiavelli Bradshaw!”
From this day forward he looked on all the young lawyer's doings with even more suspicion than before. Yet he would not forego his company and conversation; for he was very agreeable and amusing to study; and this trick he had played him was, after all, only a diplomatist's way of flattering his brother plenipotentiary. Who could say? Some time or other he might cajole England or France or Russia into a treaty with just such a trick. Shallower men than he had gone out as ministers of the great Republic. At any rate, the fellow was worth watching.
CHAPTER VI. THE USE OF SPECTACLES.
The old Master of Arts had a great reputation in the house where he lived for knowing everything that was going on. He rather enjoyed it; and sometimes amused himself with surprising his simple-hearted landlady and her boarders with the unaccountable results of his sagacity. One thing was quite beyond her comprehension. She was perfectly sure that Mr. Gridley could see out of the back of his head, just as other people see with their natural organs. Time and again he had told her what she was doing when his back was turned to her, just as if he had been sitting squarely in front of her. Some laughed at this foolish notion; but others, who knew more of the nebulous sciences, told her it was like's not jes' so. Folks had read letters laid ag'in' the pits o' their stomachs, 'n' why should n't they see out o' the backs o' their heads?
Now there was a certain fact at the bottom of this belief of Mrs. Hopkins; and as it world be a very small thing to make a mystery of so simple a matter, the reader shall have the whole benefit of knowing all there is in it,—not quite yet, however, of knowing all that came of it. It was not the mirror trick, of course, which Mrs. Felix Lorraine and other dangerous historical personages have so long made use of. It was nothing but this: Mr. Byles Gridley wore a pair of formidable spectacles with large round glasses. He had often noticed the reflection of objects behind him when they caught their images at certain angles, and had got the habit of very often looking at the reflecting surface of one or the other of the glasses, when he seemed to be looking through them. It put a singular power into his possession, which might possibly hereafter lead to something more significant than the mystification of the Widow Hopkins.