Volume II Part 20 (2/2)
”Uncle Teddy,” exclaimed Billy, with ardor, ”I wish I could do something to show you how much I think of you for being so good to me. I don't know how. Would it make you happy if I was to learn a hymn for you,--a smas.h.i.+ng big hymn--six verses, long metre, and no grumbling?”
”No, Billy; you make me happy enough just by being a good boy.”
”Oh, Uncle Teddy!” replied Billy, decidedly, ”I'm afraid I can't do it.
I've tried so often, and I always make such an awful mess of it.” ...
We now got into a Broadway stage going down, and being unable, on account of the noise, to converse further upon those spiritual conflicts of Billy's which so much interested me, amused ourselves with looking out until just as we reached the Astor House, when he asked me where we were going.
”Where do you guess?” said I.
He cast a glance through the front window, and his face became irradiated. Oh, there's nothing like the simple, cheap luxury of pleasing a child, to create suns.h.i.+ne enough for the chasing away of the bluest adult devils.
”We're going to Barnum's!” said Billy, involuntarily clapping his hands.
So we were; and, much as stuck-up people pretend to look down on the place, I frequently am. Not only so, but I always see that cla.s.s largely represented there when I do go. To be sure, they always make believe that they only come to amuse the children, or because they've country cousins visiting them, and never fail to refer to the vulgar set one finds there, and the fact of the animals smelling like any thing but Jockey Club; yet I notice that after they've been in the hall three minutes they're as much interested as any of the people they come to pooh-pooh, and only put on the high-bred air when they fancy some of their own cla.s.s are looking at them. I boldly acknowledge that I go because I like it. I am especially happy, to be sure, if I have a child along to go into ecstasies, and give me a chance, by asking questions, for the exhibition of that fund of information which is said to be one of my chief charms in the social circle, and on several occasions has led that portion of the public immediately about the Happy Family into the erroneous impression that I was Mr. Barnum, explaining his five hundred thousand curiosities.
On the present occasion, we found several visitors of the better cla.s.s in the room devoted to the aquarium. Among these was a young lady, apparently about nineteen, in a tight-fitting basque of black velvet, which showed her elegant figure to fine advantage, a skirt of garnet silk, looped up over a pretty Balmoral, and the daintiest imaginable pair of kid walking-boots. Her height was a trifle over the medium; her eyes a soft, expressive brown, shaded by ma.s.ses of hair which exactly matched their color, and, at that rat-and-miceless day fell in such graceful abandon as to show at once that nature was the only maid who crimped their waves into them. Her complexion was rosy with health and sympathetic enjoyment; her mouth was faultless, her nose sensitive, her manners full of refinement, and her voice musical as a wood-robin's, when she spoke to the little boy of six at her side, to whom she was revealing the palace of the great show-king. Billy and I were flattening our noses against the abode of the balloon-fish, and determining whether he looked most like a horse-chestnut burr or a ripe cuc.u.mber, when his eyes and my own simultaneously fell on the child and lady, In a moment, to Billy, the balloon-fish was as though he had not been.
”That's a pretty little boy!” said I. And then I asked Billy one of those senseless routine questions which must make children look at us, regarding the scope of our intellects very much as we look at Bushmen.
”How would you like to play with him?”
”Him!” replied Billy, scornfully, ”that's his first pair of boots; see him pull up his little breeches to show the red tops to 'em! But, crackey! isn't _she_ a smasher!”
After that we visited the wax figures and the sleepy snakes, the learned seal and the gla.s.s-blowers. Whenever we pa.s.sed from one room into another, Billy could be caught looking anxiously to see if the pretty girl and child were coming, too.
Time fails me to describe how Billy was lost in astonishment at the Lightning Calculator,--wanted me to beg the secret of that prodigy for him to do his sums by,--finally thought he had discovered it, and resolved to keep his arm whirling all the time he studied his arithmetic lesson the next morning. Equally inadequate is it to relate in full how he became so confused among the wax-works that he pinched the solemnest showman's legs to see if he was real, and perplexed the beautiful Circa.s.sian to the verge of idiocy by telling her he had read all about the way they sold girls like her in his geography.
We had reached the stairs to that subterranean chamber in which the Behemoth of Holy Writ was wallowing about without a thought of the dignity which one expects from a canonical character. Billy had always languished upon his memories of this diverting beast, and I stood ready to see him plunge headlong the moment that he read the sign-board at the head of the stairs. When he paused and hesitated there, not seeming at all anxious to go down till he saw the pretty girl and the child following after,--a sudden intuition flashed across me. Could it be possible that Billy was caught in that vortex which whirled me down at ten years,--a little boy's first love?
We were lingering about the elliptical basin, and catching occasional glimpses between bubbles of a vivified hair trunk of monstrous compa.s.s, whose k.n.o.bby lid opened at one end and showed a red morocco lining, when the pretty girl, in leaning over to point out the rising monster, dropped into the water one of her little gloves, and the swash made by the hippopotamus drifted it close under Billy's hand. Either in play or as a mere coincidence the animal followed it. The other children about the tank screamed and started back as he b.u.mped his nose against the side; but Billy manfully bent down and grabbed the glove not an inch from one of his big tusks, then marched around the tank and presented it to the lady with a chivalry of manner in one of his years quite surprising.
”That's a real nice boy,--you said so, didn't you, Lottie?--and I wish he'd come and play with me,” said the little fellow by the young lady's side, as Billy turned away, gracefully thanked, to come back to me with his cheeks roseate with blushes.
As he heard this, Billy idled along the edge of the tank for a moment, then faced about and said,--
”P'raps I will some day,--where do you live?”
”I live on East Seventeenth street with papa,--and Lottie stays there, too, now,--she's my cousin. Where d' you live?”
”Oh, I live close by,--right on that big green square, where I guess the nurse takes you once in a while,” said Billy, patronizingly. Then, looking up pluckily at the young lady, he added, ”I never saw you out there.”
”No; Jimmy's papa has only been in his new house a little while, and I've just come to visit him.”
”Say, will you come and play with me some time?” chimed in the inextinguishable Jimmy. ”I've got a cooking-stove,--for real fire,--and blocks and a ball with a string.”
Billy, who belonged to a club for the practice of the great American game, and was what A. Ward would call the most superior battist among the I.G.B.B.C., or ”Infant Giants,” smiled from that alt.i.tude upon Jimmy, but promised to go and play with him the next Sat.u.r.day afternoon.
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