'C'est fait!'
'It's a bargain!'
'You see, I live by my Museum. And if the public once suspected that I was a visionary man, the press and the pulpit and general opinion would run me down immediately. I should be accused of denying the originality of the human race inferentially, through my orang-outang; of teaching lessons of maternal infidelity through my stuffed ostrich; of seducing youth into a seafaring life by my preserved whale. No more schools, at half-price on Saturday afternoon, accompanied by their principal; no more favorable notices by editors, 'who have been with their families,' for you, Orloff Ruricson!
'And what I am going to tell you will seem visionary. Even to you. Nevertheless, it is as real as any of the hardest facts in my daily life. Take my solemn word for it.
'When I was ten years old, my parents emigrated from Sweden to this country. At the age of twelve, I lost my father. At thirteen, I was apprenticed to a man who stuffed birds in Dutch-street. At fourteen, I was motherless. At twenty, my term was out, and I began to think of setting up as a taxidermist on my own hook. There! The Biographical Dictionary can't beat that summary of ten years, for compactness!
'I made a very liberal offer to my master; in fact, proposed to take him into partnership. He nobly refused to avail himself of my generosity. Bird-stuffing, even in New-York, was not a very lucrative business, and would hardly support two, he suggested. What did I think of one of the river towns? Albany, or Hudson, or Poughkeepsie, for instance? I did not tell him what; but in reality, I thought so little of them, that within ten days after my indenture was cancelled, I had taken a little nook in the Bowery, with window enough to show off three blue-jays, a chameleon, and a very young wild-cat, (whose domesticity I may, at this day, acknowledge to have been slandered by that name,) and sufficient door to display the inscription: 'Orloff Ruricson, Taxidermist and Aviarian Professor.' Even at that day, you see, Bonenfant, we impostors had begun to steal your literary title.'
'Sacrebleu! I do very moshe vish zat ze only ting ze plenty humbug professors now-a-days stuff vas ze birds!'
'Well, I may have stuffed the public a little, too. At any rate, they patronized me far better than I had any reason to expect. By the time I was of age, I had moved my business one door farther up, to a shop treble the size of the first; and instead of sleeping under and eating on top of my show-case, as I began, I occupied lodgings with a respectable cutler's widow, second-story front of a brick house on Third Avenue, and came down to my store every morning at nine o'clock, like any wholesale grocer.
'I had been installed in my comfortable quarters only six weeks, when a new lodger came to the boarding-house. The first thing that I knew of it, was my beholding, directly opposite me at a Sunday dinner, the most preternaturally homely face I had ever seen. As I took my seat, and opened my napkin, the cutler's widow inclined her head in the direction of the apparition, and uttered the words: 'Miss Brentnall.' I cast a glance and a bow in the same quarter, pronouncing the name after her. 'Mr. Ruricson,' said the landlady laconically, and nodded toward me. 'Mr. Ruricson,' repeated the miracle of plainness, in a voice so sweet that I could not rid myself of the impression that it must be the ventriloquism of some one else. At the same moment she smiled. The smile was as incongruous with the face as the voice; and for that glancing half-minute, Miss Brentnall was a dozen shades more endurable.