The interest with which Mr. Fyler Close
watched the flight of Hobbleshank was by no
means diminished, when he discovered faring
forth from behind a stable-door, where he had
lain in ambush, and keeping, at an easy distance,
diligently in the track of the wrathful
old gentleman, no other than Ishmael Small.
Speeding along in a very eccentric route, sometimes
on the pavement, again in the middle of
the road, and then, with one foot on the kerb
and one in the gutter, Hobbleshank made his
way through the straitened purlieu of Pell
street—Pell street that lies just off the great
thoroughfare of the Bowery with a world of its
own, where great mackerel-venders' trumpets,
nearly as long as the street itself, are blown
all day long; where vegetable-wagons choke
the way and keep up a reek of greens and potherbs
until high noon, and where, if all the
signs and omens that pervade the street—
sights, sounds, and smells—are of any worth,
the denizens lead a retired life, with a lenten
diet, ignorant of what the great world beyond
may think of beefless dinners or breakfasts after
Pythagoras.

Through this choice precinct they sped, Hobbleshank
pushing swiftly on, and his pursuer following
at a distance with equal pace, darting
in at entry-doors and out again in a glance, to
avoid discovery, if the old man should look
back; and so they soon entered the mouth of
Doyer street—the Corkscrew lane—through
which it needs skilful pilotage to bear one safely,
every house a turn, and every kerbstone set
at a different angle, for thus, like a many-jointed
snake, Doyer street creeps out of the damp
and green-grown marsh of Pell street, upon
the open, sunny slope of Chatham square.

Following the whim of the street, which
must needs have its way, they got forth into
the broad region of the square along which
Hobbleshank speeded at a good round rate,
while Mr. Small regaled himself with an eleemosynary
ride on the foot-board of a hackney-coach,
where he sat comfortably balanced and
keeping the old man in view until they reached
Mulberry street, when he dismounted—just in
time to evade the crack of a whip from the boxscat—
and followed Hobbleshank warily into a
building some dozen or two paces off of the
main street. It was a dark, ruinous, gloomy-looking
old house,—built on a model that was
lost twenty years ago and never found again—
and had a wide, greedy hall, that swallowed up
as many chairs, tables, and other fixtures, as
the various tenants chose to cast into it.

Up the broad, rambling stairs Hobbleshank
ascended, and by the time he had attained a
cramped room at the head of the second flight,
Mr. Small had accomplished the same journey,
crept along and clambered up a narrow cornice
in the throat of the hall, and gaining, by an
exercise of dexterity peculiar to himself, a small
window in the wall, was looking very calmly
and reflectively through the same at two aged
women upon whose presence Hobbleshank had
entered.

One of them sat by the hearth; she was
small and shrivelled, with a pinched and wrinkled
countenance—so shrivelled and thin, and
seemingly void of life-like qualities, as if she
hovered only on the borders of the world, and
was ready to go at any moment's summons.
The other was stouter, though she too was
wrinkled with years and bore in her features the
traces of many past cares, which she seemed zealous
to make known by larding her discourse
with great sighs, which she heaved at the rate
of twenty a minute, while she bustled about the
chamber and busied herself in various household
offices.

These scarcely noticed the entrance of Hobbleshank,
who opened the door gently, and,
stealing in, proceeded to a corner of the room,
where, taking a chair and turning his back upon
them, he bowed his head upon his hand and
was silent.

“I tell you—you have been a blessed woman,
Dorothy—that you have,” cried the elder, in a
sharp, wiry voice from the chimney-corner,
where she was painfully employed in rubbing

[figure description] Page 200.[end figure description]

her withered palms together over the blaze, “a
blessed woman. There was my firstborn, Tom,
with as handsome a pair of blue eyes as mother
ever looked at, didn't he fall into the old
brewery well, and die there, like a malt-rat,
shouting for help, which came, of course, just
the minute after he was stifled. Always so—
always so, I tell you!”

“Whose roof was blown off in the great September
gale—yours or mine, Aunt Gatty? I'd
like to know that,” rejoined the other, heaving
a sigh of course. “Whose son was buried in
a trance for three days and better, and when
he comes to again has to be taught his alphabet
all over like a suckling child? Your loss—
Lord preserve us!—was a drop in the bucket,
so speaking, when the brewers wound it up—
nothing more.”

And the stout old lady laughed gently at the
thought of the brawny brewers tugging away
at the rope for so lively a hoist, and then fell
straightway to sighing.

“Why, you talk like a simpleton,” answered
the other, sharply, “a natural simpleton in a
dotage; there was a child of mine, Dorothy,
you mind it well—you used to say he had
hawk's eyes—so wild and bright and glancing.
That boy went mad, I think, and struck at me—
me, his mother—and that you know, too, for
many's the look you've taken at the old scar—
me, who had watched his steps all through infancy
and childhood and boyhood, up to the
very manhood that gave him strength to strike;
smote her down to the earth—was it he or the
fiend that did it?—and would have snatched
her life away, but for the men who beat him
off like a dog. There was Joe, too, my dear,”
continued Aunt Gatty, “that went down of a
dark, drearisome night, in the wild Gulf stream,
crying Heaven's help! in vain, and snatching
at the waves, as Old Buncle, the shipmaster,
told me, like a madman.” The old woman
shook as in a palsy, and waved her head painfully
to and fro, as she recited these passages
of past trouble.

“True, true, true,” said her companion, who
had paused in her labor and watched her for a
moment, “true, just as true as that Jacob—my
Jacob, I used to call him, but now he's anybody's
or nobody's—was carried off to prison
by cruel men, ten times fiercer than your Gulf
streams and your tornadoes—had his limbs
chained, and was put to hewing great blocks of
stone like a devil on penance—taken away
from good day wages and bound in a jail—”

“Peace! you foolish women!” exclaimed
Hobbleshank, starting up at this moment from
the deep silence in which he had been buried,
turning toward them and lifting both his arms
tremblingly up, “I can read you a page, a black
page out of the book of lamentations—that
should make the blood creep in your old veins
like the brook-ripples in December. There's a
quiet, serene farm-house—a quiet, serene farm-house—
with a father, a mother, yes, merciful
God! a young, happy, beautiful mother.” He
paused and bowed his head, but in a few minutes
he proceeded, “and a young child that has
just crept out upon the bleak common of this
world of ours, lying in her bosom, as it might
be Adam and his spouse, in some chosen corner
of their old garden. Some devil or other secretly
ingulfs all the fortune of that household, tortures
with a slow, killing pain, the father of
the family, by ever lending to him and ever
driving him for horrid interest—making him
toil and moil in that great inexorable mill of
usury and borrowing till his brain turns—his
old reason totters like a weak tower that shakes
in the wind. He flies from his home, wandering
to and fro, he knows not whither—straying
back to it at times, after long lunatic absences;
and one day—there's a word that should prick
your foolish old hearts like a sword's point—
coming suddenly back, he finds his fair young
wife dead!—yes, dead! starved into a skeleton
so pale and ghastly, that anatomists and men of
death would smile to look on it—and the boy, the
boy that should have gone with her, she loved
him so, into the grave she had travelled to
through hunger, or have stayed back to inherit
that roof that was his and cheer up this sad old
heart that is mine—snatched away, secretly,
nobody could tell how, or when, or whither—
and the very nurse that should have tarried to
keep company with death in that house of sorrow—
was likewise fled; and I, and old, shattered,
uncertain, poor creature, left alone in
the midst of all this desolation—as if it became
me—and had only waited for me as its rightful
master and emperor. Well, God's blessing
with you—and if you have seen greater trouble
than that, you have borne it merrily and are
miracles of old women to have lived through it
to this day!”

Saying this, the old man started up from his
chair, and staggering across the room, trembling
in every limb, he hurried into a small
chamber at the end of the apartment and cast
himself upon his couch. The two old women,
abashed by the passion and energy of the speaker,
were silent for a while and moved not a
limb. They both sat looking toward the door
where Hobbleshank had entered, as if they expected
him momently to emerge.

“A sad tale; a sad tale, in truth;” at length
said the younger. “Was the boy never heard
of?”

“Never, that I know, from that dark day to
this,” answered the other mumbling as she
spake and shrinking back into the chimney, as
if what she recalled stood shrouded before her
in a deadly form; “search was not made for
him until years after the mother's death; the
worms' banquet had been set and cleared away
many a day, when the old man who had wandered
away as soon as the funeral was over, the
Lord knows whither, came back and loitered
and lingered about his former residence, the old
farm-house in the suburbs of the city, day after
day, watching in vain, hour by hour, for the
forthcoming of some one who could tell the

p265-204 [figure description] Page 201.[end figure description]

history of what was past. The building is closed
and deserted, and has no historian but itself, or
such as would not tell, if they could, the fate
of the lost child, or the secret of his death if
dead he be.”

“And where is the nurse?”

“Absent, missing, drowned, or murdered, or
dead in due course of nature; nobody can tell.
The house is deserted and gone to decay and is
said to belong to a wretched miser, whose right
came, somehow or other, through the child's
death. There's the whole story, and this old
man who came to live with me so long ago—
even before you knew me—and has never once
spoken of it till this night, is the only wreck of
the troubles, and cares, and crosses, that howled
about it till they found entrance twenty years
ago. Something has stirred him strangely or
he would not have spoken this night.”

“Perhaps his mind is failing,” said the other,
“for when that's ebbing away it always uncovers
what is at the bottom, and brings to light
things hidden in its depths for years.”

“He may have seen some object associated
with old times that has touched him,” answered
Aunt Gatty, “visited, perhaps, the farm-house
itself; or have chanced upon some person connected
with these terrible events.”

“It may be so. But let us to bed, my dear
old friend, and pray that the Spirit of Peace be
in the old man's slumbers.”

“Amen!” said her companion; and, extinguishing
their light, and carefully drawing a
curtain before the chamber-window where
Hobbleshank lodged, that the morning beam
might not disturb his repose, they were soon
sheltered in the quiet and darkness of night that
wrapped them all about.

Ishmael Small, who had greedily watched
them all through, after stretching his blank
features forward into the gloom of the apartment
to catch any further word that might
chance to fall, crept down from his post of observation
and stole cautiously away.