Well; it is absolutely too late for dinner!Turtle, salmon, tautog, woodcock, boiled turkey, South-Down mutton, pig, roast-beef, have vanished,or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and gravies crusted over with cold fat.The Judge, had he done nothing else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork.It was he, you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogre-like appetite,that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the dinner-hour made him a great beast.Persons of his large sensual endowments must claim indulgence, at their feeding-time. But,for once, the Judge is entirely too late for dinner!Too late, we fear, even to join the party at their wine!The guests are warm and merry; they have given up the Judge; and,concluding that the Free-Soilers have him, they will fix upon another candidate.Were our friend now to stalk in among them, with that wide-open stare, at once wild and stolid,his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer.Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally so scrupulous in his attire,to show himself at a dinner-table with that crimson stain upon his shirt-bosom. By the bye, how came it there?It is an ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button his coat closely over his breast,and, taking his horse and chaise from the livery stable, to make all speed to his own house. There,after a glass of brandy and water, and a mutton-chop, a beefsteak, a broiled fowl,or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one,he had better spend the evening by the fireside. He must toast his slippers a long while,in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this vile old house has sent curdling through his veins.
Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up!You have lost a day. But to-morrow will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it?To-morrow. To-morrow!To-morrow. We, that are alive, may rise betimes to-morrow. As for him that has died to-day,his morrow will be the resurrection morn.
Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the room.The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first become more definite; then,spreading wider, they lose their distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion,as it were, that creeps slowly over the various objects,and the one human figure sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without;it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time,will possess itself of everything. The Judge’s face, indeed, rigid and singularly white,refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter and fainter grows the light.It is as if another double-handful of darkness had been scattered through the air.Now it is no longer gray, but sable. There is still a faint appearance at the window;neither a glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmer,—any phrase of light would express something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense,rather, that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished?No!—yes!—not quite!And there is still the swarthy whiteness,—we shall venture to marry these ill-agreeing words,—the swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheon’s face. The features are all gone:there is only the paleness of them left. And how looks it now?There is no window!There is no face!An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight!Where is our universe?All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind,that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!
Is there no other sound?One other, and a fearful one. It is the ticking of the Judge’s watch, which,ever since Hepzibah left the room in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand.Be the cause what it may, this little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time’s pulse,repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge Pyncheon’s motionless hand,has an effect of terror, which we do not find in any other accompaniment of the scene.
But, listen!That puff of the breeze was louder. It had a tone unlike the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself,and afflicted all mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past. The wind has veered about!It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and,taking hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a shake,like a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist.Another and another sturdy tussle with the blast!The old house creaks again, and makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty throat (the big flue,we mean, of its wide chimney), partly in complaint at the rude wind, but rather,as befits their century and a half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance.A rumbling kind of a bluster roars behind the fire-board. A door has slammed above stairs.A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an unruly gust.It is not to be conceived, before-hand,what wonderful wind-instruments are these old timber mansions,and how haunted with the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and sob,and shriek,—and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous, in some distant chamber,—and to tread along the entries as with stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase,as with silks miraculously stiff,—whenever the gale catches the house with a window open,and gets fairly into it. Would that we were not an attendant spirit here!It is too awful!This clamor of the wind through the lonely house; the Judge’s quietude, as he sits invisible;and that pertinacious ticking of his watch!
As regards Judge Pyncheon’s invisibility, however, that matter will soon be remedied.The northwest wind has swept the sky clear. The window is distinctly seen. Through its panes,moreover, we dimly catch the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside,fluttering with a constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight, now here,now there. Oftener than any other object, these glimpses illuminate the Judge’s face.But here comes more effectual light. Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the pear-tree,and now a little lower, and now on the whole mass of boughs, while,through their shifting intricacies, the moonbeams fall aslant into the room.They play over the Judge’s figure and show that he has not stirred throughout the hours of darkness.They follow the shadows, in changeful sport, across his unchanging features.They gleam upon his watch. His grasp conceals the dial-plate,—but we know that the faithful hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight.
A man of sturdy understanding, like Judge Pyncheon,cares no more for twelve o’clock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon.However just the parallel drawn, in some of the preceding pages,between his Puritan ancestor and himself, it fails in this point.The Pyncheon of two centuries ago, in common with most of his contemporaries,professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations,although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character. The Pyncheon of to-night,who sits in yonder arm-chair, believes in no such nonsense. Such, at least, was his creed,some few hours since. His hair will not bristle, therefore,at the stories which—in times when chimney-corners had benches in them,where old people sat poking into the ashes of the past,and raking out traditions like live coals—used to be told about this very room of his ancestral house.In fact, these tales are too absurd to bristle even childhood’s hair. What sense, meaning,or moral, for example, such as even ghost-stories should be susceptible of,can be traced in the ridiculous legend, that, at midnight,all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor?And, pray, for what?Why, to see whether the portrait of their ancestor still keeps its place upon the wall,in compliance with his testamentary directions!Is it worth while to come out of their graves for that?
We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea.Ghost-stories are hardly to be treated seriously any longer.The family-party of the defunct Pyncheons, we presume, goes off in this wise.
First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeple-hat, and trunk-breeches,girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which hangs his steel-hilted sword;he has a long staff in his hand, such as gentlemen in advanced life used to carry,as much for the dignity of the thing as for the support to be derived from it.He looks up at the portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image!All is safe. The picture is still there.The purpose of his brain has been kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in graveyard grass. See!he lifts his ineffectual hand, and tries the frame. All safe!But is that a smile?—is it not, rather a frown of deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features?The stout Colonel is dissatisfied!So decided is his look of discontent as to impart additional distinctness to his features;through which, nevertheless, the moonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond.Something has strangely vexed the ancestor!With a grim shake of the head, he turns away. Here come other Pyncheons, the whole tribe,in their half a dozen generations, jostling and elbowing one another, to reach the picture.We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien,and a red-coated officer of the old French war;and there comes the shop-keeping Pyncheon of a century ago,with the ruffles turned back from his wrists;and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist’s legend,with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out of her virgin grave.All try the picture-frame. What do these ghostly people seek?A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch it!There is evidently a mystery about the picture,that perplexes these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest. In a corner, meanwhile,stands the figure of an elderly man, in a leathern jerkin and breeches,with a carpenter’s rule sticking out of his side pocket;he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants, nodding, jeering, mocking,and finally bursting into obstreperous, though inaudible laughter.
Indulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of restraint and guidance.We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our visionary scene.Among those ancestral people there is a young man, dressed in the very fashion of to-day:he wears a dark frock-coat, almost destitute of skirts, gray pantaloons,gaiter boots of patent leather, and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast,and a little silver-headed whalebone stick in his hand. Were we to meet this figure at noonday,we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon, the Judge’s only surviving child,who has been spending the last two years in foreign travel. If still in life, how comes his shadow hither?If dead, what a misfortune!The old Pyncheon property, together with the great estate acquired by the young man’s father, would devolve on whom?On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phœbe!But another and a greater marvel greets us!Can we believe our eyes?A stout, elderly gentleman has made his appearance; he has an aspect of eminent respectability,wears a black coat and pantaloons, of roomy width,and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire,but for a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his shirt-bosom. Is it the Judge, or no?How can it be Judge Pyncheon?We discern his figure, as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us anything, still seated in the oaken chair!Be the apparition whose it may, it advances to the picture, seems to seize the frame,tries to peep behind it, and turns away, with a frown as black as the ancestral one.
The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as forming an actual portion of our story.We were betrayed into this brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams;they dance hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the looking-glass, which, you are aware,is always a kind of window or doorway into the spiritual world. We needed relief, moreover,from our too long and exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair. This wild wind, too,has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion,but without tearing them away from their one determined centre.Yonder leaden Judge sits immovably upon our soul. Will he never stir again?We shall go mad unless he stirs!You may the better estimate his quietude by the fearlessness of a little mouse,which sits on its hind legs, in a streak of moonlight, close by Judge Pyncheon’s foot,and seems to meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk. Ha!what has startled the nimble little mouse?It is the visage of grimalkin, outside of the window,where he appears to have posted himself for a deliberate watch.This grimalkin has a very ugly look. Is it a cat watching for a mouse, or the devil for a human soul?Would we could scare him from the window!
Thank Heaven, the night is well-nigh past!The moonbeams have no longer so silvery a gleam,nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the shadows among which they fall.They are paler now; the shadows look gray, not black. The boisterous wind is hushed. What is the hour?Ah!the watch has at last ceased to tick; for the Judge’s forgetful fingers neglected to wind it up,as usual, at ten o’clock, being half an hour or so before his ordinary bedtime,—and it has run down, for the first time in five years.But the great world-clock of Time still keeps its beat. The dreary night—for, oh,how dreary seems its haunted waste, behind us!—gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn. Blessed, blessed radiance!The daybeam—even what little of it finds its way into this always dusky parlor—seems part of the universal benediction,annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible, and happiness attainable.Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair?Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on his brow?Will he begin this new day,—which God has smiled upon, and blessed, and given to mankind,—will he begin it with better purposes than the many that have been spent amiss?Or are all the deep-laid schemes of yesterday as stubborn in his heart, and as busy in his brain, as ever?
In this latter case, there is much to do.Will the Judge still insist with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford?Will he buy a safe, elderly gentleman’s horse?Will he persuade the purchaser of the old Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor?Will he see his family physician, and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him,to be an honor and blessing to his race, until the utmost term of patriarchal longevity?Will Judge Pyncheon, above all, make due apologies to that company of honorable friends,and satisfy them that his absence from the festive board was unavoidable,and so fully retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of Massachusetts?And all these great purposes accomplished, will he walk the streets again,with that dog-day smile of elaborate benevolence,sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it?Or will he, after the tomb-like seclusion of the past day and night,go forth a humbled and repentant man, sorrowful, gentle, seeking no profit,shrinking from worldly honor, hardly daring to love God, but bold to love his fellow man, and to do him what good he may?Will he bear about with him,—no odious grin of feigned benignity, insolent in its pretence,and loathsome in its falsehood,—but the tender sadness of a contrite heart, broken, at last, beneath its own weight of sin?For it is our belief, whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it,that there was heavy sin at the base of this man’s being.
Rise up, Judge Pyncheon!The morning sunshine glimmers through the foliage, and, beautiful and holy as it is,shuns not to kindle up your face. Rise up, thou subtle, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted hypocrite,and make thy choice whether still to be subtle, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted, and hypocritical,or to tear these sins out of thy nature, though they bring the lifeblood with them!The Avenger is upon thee!Rise up, before it be too late!
What!Thou art not stirred by this last appeal?No, not a jot!And there we see a fly,—one of your common house-flies,such as are always buzzing on the window-pane,—which has smelt out Governor Pyncheon, and alights,now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us!is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be chief-magistrate’s wide-open eyes!Canst thou not brush the fly away?Art thou too sluggish?Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects yesterday!Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful?Not brush away a fly?Nay, then, we give thee up!
And hark!the shop-bell rings. After hours like these latter ones, through which we have borne our heavy tale,it is good to be made sensible that there is a living world, and that even this old,lonely mansion retains some manner of connection with it. We breathe more freely,emerging from Judge Pyncheon’s presence into the street before the Seven Gables.
XIX. Alice’s Posies
Uncle Venner, trundling a wheelbarrow, was the earliest person stirring in the neighborhood the day after the storm.
Pyncheon Street, in front of the House of the Seven Gables,was a far pleasanter scene than a by-lane, confined by shabby fences,and bordered with wooden dwellings of the meaner class, could reasonably be expected to present.Nature made sweet amends, that morning, for the five unkindly days which had preceded it.It would have been enough to live for, merely to look up at the wide benediction of the sky,or as much of it as was visible between the houses, genial once more with sunshine.Every object was agreeable, whether to be gazed at in the breadth, or examined more minutely. Such,for example, were the well-washed pebbles and gravel of the sidewalk;even the sky-reflecting pools in the centre of the street; and the grass, now freshly verdant,that crept along the base of the fences, on the other side of which, if one peeped over,was seen the multifarious growth of gardens. Vegetable productions, of whatever kind,seemed more than negatively happy, in the juicy warmth and abundance of their life.The Pyncheon Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive,and full of the morning sun and a sweet-tempered little breeze,which lingered within this verdant sphere,and set a thousand leafy tongues a-whispering all at once.This aged tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the gale. It had kept its boughs unshattered,and its full complement of leaves; and the whole in perfect verdure, except a single branch, that,by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the autumn,had been transmuted to bright gold. It was like the golden branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades.
This one mystic branch hung down before the main entrance of the Seven Gables,so nigh the ground that any passer-by might have stood on tiptoe and plucked it off.Presented at the door, it would have been a symbol of his right to enter,and be made acquainted with all the secrets of the house.So little faith is due to external appearance,that there was really an inviting aspect over the venerable edifice,conveying an idea that its history must be a decorous and happy one,and such as would be delightful for a fireside tale.Its windows gleamed cheerfully in the slanting sunlight. The lines and tufts of green moss,here and there, seemed pledges of familiarity and sisterhood with Nature;as if this human dwelling-place, being of such old date,had established its prescriptive title among primeval oaks and whatever other objects,by virtue of their long continuance, have acquired a gracious right to be.A person of imaginative temperament, while passing by the house, would turn, once and again,and peruse it well: its many peaks, consenting together in the clustered chimney;the deep projection over its basement-story; the arched window, imparting a look,if not of grandeur, yet of antique gentility, to the broken portal over which it opened;the luxuriance of gigantic burdocks, near the threshold; he would note all these characteristics,and be conscious of something deeper than he saw.He would conceive the mansion to have been the residence of the stubborn old Puritan, Integrity,who, dying in some forgotten generation, had left a blessing in all its rooms and chambers,the efficacy of which was to be seen in the religion, honesty, moderate competence,or upright poverty and solid happiness, of his descendants, to this day.
One object, above all others, would take root in the imaginative observer’s memory.It was the great tuft of flowers,—weeds, you would have called them, only a week ago,—the tuft of crimson-spotted flowers, in the angle between the two front gables.The old people used to give them the name of Alice’s Posies, in remembrance of fair Alice Pyncheon,who was believed to have brought their seeds from Italy.They were flaunting in rich beauty and full bloom to-day, and seemed, as it were,a mystic expression that something within the house was consummated.
It was but little after sunrise, when Uncle Venner made his appearance, as aforesaid,impelling a wheelbarrow along the street.He was going his matutinal rounds to collect cabbage-leaves, turnip-tops, potato-skins,and the miscellaneous refuse of the dinner-pot,which the thrifty housewives of the neighborhood were accustomed to put aside,as fit only to feed a pig. Uncle Venner’s pig was fed entirely, and kept in prime order,on these eleemosynary contributions; insomuch that the patched philosopher used to promise that,before retiring to his farm, he would make a feast of the portly grunter,and invite all his neighbors to partake of the joints and spare-ribs which they had helped to fatten.Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon’s housekeeping had so greatly improved,since Clifford became a member of the family,that her share of the banquet would have been no lean one; and Uncle Venner, accordingly,was a good deal disappointed not to find the large earthen pan, full of fragmentary eatables,that ordinarily awaited his coming at the back doorstep of the Seven Gables.
“I never knew Miss Hepzibah so forgetful before,” said the patriarch to himself.“She must have had a dinner yesterday,—no question of that!She always has one, nowadays. So where’s the pot-liquor and potato-skins, I ask?Shall I knock, and see if she’s stirring yet?No, no,—’twon’t do!If little Phœbe was about the house, I should not mind knocking; but Miss Hepzibah, likely as not,would scowl down at me out of the window, and look cross, even if she felt pleasantly. So, I’ll come back at noon.”
With these reflections, the old man was shutting the gate of the little back-yard.Creaking on its hinges, however, like every other gate and door about the premises,the sound reached the ears of the occupant of the northern gable,one of the windows of which had a side-view towards the gate.
“Good-morning, Uncle Venner!” said the daguerreotypist, leaning out of the window. “Do you hear nobody stirring?”
“Not a soul,” said the man of patches. “But that’s no wonder. ’Tis barely half an hour past sunrise,yet. But I’m really glad to see you, Mr. Holgrave!There’s a strange, lonesome look about this side of the house; so that my heart misgave me,somehow or other, and I felt as if there was nobody alive in it.The front of the house looks a good deal cheerier;and Alice’s Posies are blooming there beautifully; and if I were a young man, Mr. Holgrave,my sweetheart should have one of those flowers in her bosom,though I risked my neck climbing for it!Well, and did the wind keep you awake last night?”
“It did, indeed!” answered the artist, smiling. “If I were a believer in ghosts,—and I don’t quite know whether I am or not,—I should have concluded that all the old Pyncheons were running riot in the lower rooms,especially in Miss Hepzibah’s part of the house. But it is very quiet now.”
“Yes, Miss Hepzibah will be apt to over-sleep herself, after being disturbed, all night,with the racket,” said Uncle Venner. “But it would be odd, now, wouldn’t it,if the Judge had taken both his cousins into the country along with him?I saw him go into the shop yesterday.”
“At what hour?” inquired Holgrave.
“Oh, along in the forenoon,” said the old man. “Well, well!I must go my rounds, and so must my wheelbarrow. But I’ll be back here at dinner-time;for my pig likes a dinner as well as a breakfast. No meal-time, and no sort of victuals,ever seems to come amiss to my pig. Good morning to you!And, Mr. Holgrave, if I were a young man, like you, I’d get one of Alice’s Posies,and keep it in water till Phœbe comes back.”
“I have heard,” said the daguerreotypist, as he drew in his head,“that the water of Maule’s well suits those flowers best.”
Here the conversation ceased, and Uncle Venner went on his way. For half an hour longer,nothing disturbed the repose of the Seven Gables; nor was there any visitor, except a carrier-boy,who, as he passed the front doorstep, threw down one of his newspapers; for Hepzibah, of late,had regularly taken it in. After a while, there came a fat woman, making prodigious speed,and stumbling as she ran up the steps of the shop-door. Her face glowed with fire-heat, and,it being a pretty warm morning, she bubbled and hissed, as it were,as if all a-fry with chimney-warmth, and summer-warmth,and the warmth of her own corpulent velocity. She tried the shop-door; it was fast.She tried it again, with so angry a jar that the bell tinkled angrily back at her.
“The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon!” muttered the irascible housewife. “Think of her pretending to set up a cent-shop, and then lying abed till noon!These are what she calls gentlefolk’s airs, I suppose!But I’ll either start her ladyship, or break the door down!”
She shook it accordingly, and the bell, having a spiteful little temper of its own,rang obstreperously, making its remonstrances heard,—not, indeed,by the ears for which they were intended,—but by a good lady on the opposite side of the street.She opened the window, and addressed the impatient applicant.
“You’ll find nobody there, Mrs. Gubbins.”
“But I must and will find somebody here!” cried Mrs. Gubbins, inflicting another outrage on the bell. “I want a half-pound of pork,to fry some first-rate flounders for Mr. Gubbins’s breakfast; and, lady or not,Old Maid Pyncheon shall get up and serve me with it!”
“But do hear reason, Mrs. Gubbins!” responded the lady opposite. “She, and her brother too, have both gone to their cousin’s,Judge Pyncheon’s at his country-seat. There’s not a soul in the house,but that young daguerreotype-man that sleeps in the north gable.I saw old Hepzibah and Clifford go away yesterday; and a queer couple of ducks they were, paddling through the mud-puddles!They’re gone, I’ll assure you.”
“And how do you know they’re gone to the Judge’s?” asked Mrs. Gubbins. “He’s a rich man; and there’s been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah this many a day,because he won’t give her a living. That’s the main reason of her setting up a cent-shop.”
“I know that well enough,” said the neighbor. “But they’re gone,—that’s one thing certain.And who but a blood relation, that couldn’t help himself, I ask you,would take in that awful-tempered old maid, and that dreadful Clifford?That’s it, you may be sure.”
Mrs. Gubbins took her departure, still brimming over with hot wrath against the absent Hepzibah.For another half-hour, or, perhaps, considerably more,there was almost as much quiet on the outside of the house as within. The elm, however,made a pleasant, cheerful, sunny sigh, responsive to the breeze that was elsewhere imperceptible;a swarm of insects buzzed merrily under its drooping shadow,and became specks of light whenever they darted into the sunshine; a locust sang, once or twice,in some inscrutable seclusion of the tree; and a solitary little bird, with plumage of pale gold, came and hovered about Alice’s Posies.
At last our small acquaintance, Ned Higgins, trudged up the street, on his way to school;and happening, for the first time in a fortnight, to be the possessor of a cent,he could by no means get past the shop-door of the Seven Gables. But it would not open.Again and again, however, and half a dozen other agains,with the inexorable pertinacity of a child intent upon some object important to itself,did he renew his efforts for admittance. He had, doubtless, set his heart upon an elephant; or,possibly, with Hamlet, he meant to eat a crocodile. In response to his more violent attacks,the bell gave, now and then, a moderate tinkle,but could not be stirred into clamor by any exertion of the little fellow’s childish and tiptoe strength.Holding by the door-handle, he peeped through a crevice of the curtain,and saw that the inner door, communicating with the passage towards the parlor, was closed.
“Miss Pyncheon!” screamed the child, rapping on the window-pane, “I want an elephant!”
There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons, Ned began to grow impatient;and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over, he picked up a stone,with a naughty purpose to fling it through the window;at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath.A man—one of two who happened to be passing by—caught the urchin’s arm.
“What’s the trouble, old gentleman?” he asked.