had been brought up in the austere quiet of a small New England town, where life was sad and manners grave, and when about eighteen served for a while in the portion of our army then acting in the North. The life of adventure dissatisfied me with my too quiet home, and when the war ended I was glad to accept the offer of an uncle in China to enter his business house. To prepare for this it was decided that I should spend six months with one of the great East India firms. For this purpose I came to Philadelphia, and by and by found myself a boarder in an up-town street, in a curious household ruled over by a lady of the better class of the people called Friends.
For many days I was a lonely man among the eight or ten people who came down one by one at early hours to our breakfast-table and ate somewhat silently and went their several ways. Mostly, we were clerks in the India houses which founded so many Philadelphia fortunes, but there were also two or three of whom we knew little, and who went and came as they liked.
It was a quiet lodging-house, where, because of being on the outskirts and away from the fashion and stir of the better streets, chiefly those came who could pay but little, and among them some of the luckless ones who are always to be found in such groups—stranded folks, who for the most part have lost hope in life. The quiet, pretty woman who kept the house was of an ancient Quaker stock which had come over long ago in a sombre Quaker Mayflower, and had by and by gone to decay, as the best of families will. When I first saw her and some of her inmates it was on a pleasant afternoon early in September, and I recall even now the simple and quiet picture of the little back parlor where I sat down among them as a new guest. I had been tranquilly greeted, and had slipped away into a corner behind a table, whence I looked out with some curiosity on the room and on the dwellers with whom my lot was to be cast for a long while to come. I was a youth shy with the shyness of my age, but, having had a share of rough, hardy life, ruddy of visage and full of that intense desire to know things and people that springs up quickly in those who have lived in country hamlets far from the stir and bustle of city life.
The room I looked upon was strange, the people strange. On the floor was India matting, red and white in little squares. A panel of painted white wood-work ran around an octagonal chamber, into which stole silently the evening twilight through open windows and across a long brick-walled garden-space full of roses and Virginia creepers and odorless wisterias. Between the windows sat a silent, somewhat stately female, dressed in gray silk, with a plain frilled cap about the face, and with long and rather slim arms tightly clad in silk. Her fingers played at hide-and-seek among some marvelous lace stitches—evidently a woman whose age had fallen heir to the deft ways of her youth. Over her against the wall hung a portrait of a girl of twenty, somewhat sober in dress, with what we should call a Martha Washington cap. It was a pleasant face, unstirred by any touch of fate, with calm blue eyes awaiting the future.
The hostess saw, I fancied, my set gaze, and rising came toward me as if minded to put at ease the new-comer. "Thee does not know our friends?" she said. "Let me make thee known to them."
I rose quickly and said, "I shall be most glad."
We went over toward the dame between the windows. "Mother," she said, raising her voice, "this is our new friend, Henry Shelburne, from New England."
As she spoke I saw the old lady stir and move, and after a moment she said, "Has he a four-leaved clover?"
"Always that is what she says. Thee will get used to it in time."
"We all do," said a voice at my elbow; and turning I saw a man of about thirty years, dressed in the plainest-cut Quaker clothes, but with a contradiction to every tenet of Fox written on his face, where a brow of gravity for ever read the riot act to eyes that twinkled with ill-repressed mirth. When I came to know him well, and saw the preternatural calm of his too quiet lips, I used to imagine that unseen little demons of ready laughter were for ever twitching at their corners.
"Mother is very old," said my hostess.
"Awfully old," said my male friend, whose name proved to be Richard Wholesome.
"Thee might think it sad to see one whose whole language has come to be just these words, but sometimes she will be glad and say, 'Has thee a four-leaved clover?' and sometimes she will be ready to cry, and will say only the same words. But if thee were to say, 'Have a cup of coffee?' she would but answer, 'Has thee a four-leaved clover?' Does it not seem strange to thee, and sad? We are used to it, as it might be—quite used to it. And that above her is her picture as a girl."
"Saves her a deal of talking," said Mr. Wholesome, "and thinking. Any words would serve her as well. Might have said, 'Topsail halyards,' all the same."
"Richard!" said Mistress White. Mistress Priscilla White was her name.
"Perchance thee would pardon me," said Mr. Wholesome.
"I wonder," said a third voice in the window, "does the nice old dame know what color has the clover? and does she remember fields of clover—pink among the green?"
"Has thee a four-leaved clover?" re-echoed the voice feebly from between the windows.
The man who was curious as to the dame's remembrances was a small stout person whose arms and legs did not seem to belong to him, and whose face was strangely gnarled, like the odd face a boy might carve on a hickory-nut, but withal a visage pleasant and ruddy.
"That," said Mistress White as he moved away, "is Mr. Schmidt—an old boarder with some odd ways of his own which we mostly forgive. A good man if it were not for his pipe," she added demurely—"altogether a good man."
"With or without his pipe," said Mr. Wholesome.
"Richard!" returned our hostess, with a half smile.
"Without his pipe," he added; and the unseen demons twitched at the corners of his mouth anew.
Altogether, these seemed to me droll people, they said so little, and, saving the small German, were so serenely grave. I suppose that first evening must have made a deep mark on my memory, for to this day I recall it with the clearness of a picture still before my eyes. Between the windows sat the old dame with hands quiet on her lap now that the twilight had grown deeper—a silent, gray Quaker sphinx, with one only remembrance out of all her seventy years of life. In the open window sat as in a frame the daughter, a woman of some twenty-five years, rosy yet as only a Quakeress can be when rebel Nature flaunts on the soft cheek the colors its owner may not wear on her gray dress. The outline was of a face clearly cut and noble, as if copied from a Greek gem—a face filled with a look of constant patience too great perhaps for one woman's share, with a certain weariness in it also at times, yet cheerful too, and even almost merry at times—the face of one more thoughtful of others than herself, and, despite toil and sordid cares, a gentlewoman, as was plain to see. The shaft of light from the window in which she sat broadened into the room, and faded to shadow in far corners among chairs with claw toes and shining mahogany tables—the furniture of that day, with a certain flavor about it of elegance, reflecting the primness and solidness of the owners. I wonder if to-day our furniture represents us too in any wise? At least it will not through the generations to follow us: of that we may be sure. In the little garden, with red graveled walks between rows of box, walked to and fro Mr. Schmidt, smoking his meerschaum—a rare sight in those days, and almost enough to ensure your being known as odd. He walked about ten paces, and went and came on the same path, while on the wall above a large gray cat followed his motions to and fro, as if having some personal interest in his movements. Against an apricot tree leaned Mr. Wholesome, watching with gleams of amusement the cat and the man, and now and then filliping at her a bit of plaster which he pulled from the wall. Then the cat would start up alert, and the man's face would get to be quizzically unconscious; after which the cat would settle down and the game begin anew. By and by I was struck with the broad shoulders and easy way in which Wholesome carried his head, and the idea came to me
