rounder.”
Mr. Lamps demonstrated in action what this meant, by pulling out his oily handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, and giving himself an elaborate smear, from behind the right ear, up the cheek, across the forehead, and down the other cheek to behind his left ear. After this operation he shone exceedingly.
“It’s according to my custom when particular warmed up by any agitation, sir,” he offered by way of apology. “And really, I am throwed into that state of amaze by finding you brought acquainted with Phoebe, that I—that I think I will, if you’ll excuse me, take another rounder.” Which he did, seeming to be greatly restored by it.
They were now both standing by the side of her couch, and she was working at her lace-pillow. “Your daughter tells me,” said Barbox Brothers, still in a half-reluctant shamefaced way, “that she never sits up.”
“No, sir, nor never has done. You see, her mother (who died when she was a year and two months old) was subject to very bad fits, and as she had never mentioned to me that she WAS subject to fits, they couldn’t be guarded against. Consequently, she dropped the baby when took, and this happened.”
“It was very wrong of her,” said Barbox Brothers with a knitted brow, “to marry you, making a secret of her infirmity.’
“Well, sir!” pleaded Lamps in behalf of the long-deceased. “You see, Phoebe and me, we have talked that over too. And Lord bless us! Such a number on us has our infirmities, what with fits, and what with misfits, of one sort and another, that if we confessed to ‘em all before we got married, most of us might never get married.”
“Might not that be for the better?”
“Not in this case, sir,” said Phoebe, giving her hand to her father.
“No, not in this case, sir,” said her father, patting it between his own.
“You correct me,” returned Barbox Brothers with a blush; “and I must look so like a Brute, that at all events it would be superfluous in me to confess to THAT infirmity. I wish you would tell me a little more about yourselves. I hardly knew how to ask it of you, for I am conscious that I have a bad stiff manner, a dull discouraging way with me, but I wish you would.”
“With all our hearts, sir,” returned Lamps gaily for both. “And first of all, that you may know my name—”
“Stay!” interposed the visitor with a slight flush. “What signifies your name? Lamps is name enough for me. I like it. It is bright and expressive. What do I want more?”
“Why, to be sure, sir,” returned Lamps. “I have in general no other name down at the Junction; but I thought, on account of your being here as a first-class single, in a private character, that you might—”
The visitor waved the thought away with his hand, and Lamps acknowledged the mark of confidence by taking another rounder.
“You are hard-worked, I take for granted?” said Barbox Brothers, when the subject of the rounder came out of it much dirtier than be went into it.
Lamps was beginning, “Not particular so”—when his daughter took him up.
“Oh yes, sir, he is very hard-worked. Fourteen, fifteen, eighteen hours a day. Sometimes twenty-four hours at a time.”
“And you,” said Barbox Brothers, “what with your school, Phoebe, and what with your lace-making—”
“But my school is a pleasure to me,” she interrupted, opening her brown eyes wider, as if surprised to find him so obtuse. “I began it when I was but a child, because it brought me and other children into company, don’t you see? THAT was not work. I carry it on still, because it keeps children about me. THAT is not work. I do it as love, not as work. Then my lace-pillow;” her busy hands had stopped, as if her argument required all her cheerful earnestness, but now went on again at the name; “it goes with my thoughts when I think, and it goes with my tunes when I hum any, and THAT’S not work. Why, you yourself thought it was music, you know, sir. And so it is to me.”
“Everything is!” cried Lamps radiantly. “Everything is music to her, sir.”
“My father is, at any rate,” said Phoebe, exultingly pointing her thin forefinger at him. “There is more music in my father than there is in a brass band.”
“I say! My dear! It’s very fillyillially done, you know; but you are flattering your father,” he protested, sparkling.
“No, I am not, sir, I assure you. No, I am not. If you could hear my father sing, you would know I am not. But you never will hear him sing, because he never sings to any one but me. However tired he is, he always sings to me when he comes home. When I lay here long ago, quite a poor little broken doll, he used to sing to me. More than that, he used to make songs, bringing in whatever little jokes we had between us. More than that, he often does so to this day. Oh! I’ll tell of you, father, as the gentleman has asked about you. He is a poet, sir.”
“I shouldn’t wish the gentleman, my dear,” observed Lamps, for the moment turning grave, “to carry away that opinion of your father, because it might look as if I was given to asking the stars in a molloncolly manner what they was up to. Which I wouldn’t at once waste the time, and take the liberty, my dear.”
“My father,” resumed Phoebe, amending her text, “is always on the bright side, and the good side. You told me, just now, I had a happy disposition. How can I help it?”
“Well; but, my dear,” returned Lamps argumentatively, “how can I help it? Put it to yourself sir. Look at her. Always as you see her now. Always working—and after all, sir, for but a very few shillings a week—always contented, always lively, always interested in others, of all sorts. I said, this moment, she was always as you see her now. So she is, with a difference that comes to much the same. For, when it is my Sunday off and the morning bells have done ringing, I hear the prayers and thanks read in the touchingest way, and I have the hymns sung to me—so soft, sir, that you couldn’t hear ‘em out of this room—in notes that seem to me, I am sure, to come from Heaven and go back to it.”
It might have been merely through the association of these words with their sacredly quiet time, or it might have been through the larger association of the words with the Redeemer’s presence beside the bedridden; but here her dexterous fingers came to a stop on the lace-pillow, and clasped themselves around his neck as he bent down. There was great natural sensibility in both father and daughter, the visitor could easily see; but each made it, for the other’s sake, retiring, not demonstrative; and perfect cheerfulness, intuitive or acquired, was either the first or second nature of both. In a very few moments Lamps was taking another rounder with his comical features
