City and town life -- Fiction; Short stories, American
It was on to this peaceful assemblage that Berta, Mis' Sykes's little
Switzerland maid, came rushing. And her face was pale and white. "Oh,
Mis' Sykes," she says, "oh, what jew s'pose? I found a little boy
setting on the front stoop."
Mis' Sykes is always calm--not so much because calm is Christian as
because calm is grand lady, I always think. "On whose stoop, Berta?" she
ask' her kind.
"On your own stoop, ma'am," cried Berta excitable.
"And whose little boy is it, Berta?" she ask', still more calm and
kind.
"That's what I donno, ma'am," says Berta. "Nor they don't no one seem to
know."
We all ask' her then, so that I don't know, I'm sure, how she managed to
say a word on her own hook. It seems that she'd come around the house
and see him setting there, still as a mouse. When he see her, he looked
up and smiled, and got up like he'd been waiting for somebody. Berta had
taken him in the kitchen.
"And he's wearing all different clothes than I ever see before in my
life," said Berta, "and he don't know who he is, nor nothing. Nor he
don't talk right."
Mis' Sykes got up in her grand, deliberate way. "Undoubtedly it's
wandered away from its ma," says she, and goes out with the girl that
was still talking excitable without getting a great deal said.
The rest of us finished setting the hall in shape. It looked real nice,
with the Friendship Village booth on one side and the Foreign booth on
the other. Of course the Friendship Village booth was considerably the
biggest, being that was the one we knew the most about.
Then us ladies started home, and we were rounding the corner by Mis'
Sykes's, when we met her a-running out.
"Ladies," she says, "if this is anybody's child that lives in
Friendship Village, I wish you'd tell me whose. Come along in."
She was awful excited, and I don't blame her. Sitting on the foot of the
lounge in her dining-room was the funniest little dud ever I see. He was
about four years old, and he had on a little dress that was all gold
braid, and animals, and pictures, and biscuits, and shells, looked like.
But his face was like any--black eyes he had, and a nice skin, and
plain, brown hair, and no hat.
"For the land," we all says, "where _did_ he come from?"
"Now listen at this," says Mis' Sykes, and she squatted down in front of
him that was eating his cracker so pretty, and she says, "What's your
name?"
It stumped him. He only stared.
Mis' Sykes rolled her eyes, and she pressed him. "Where d'you live?"
That stumped him too. He only stared on.
"What's your papa's name?"
That was a worse poser. So was everything else we asked him. Pretty soon
he begun to cry, and that was a language we could all understand. But
when we ask' him, frantic, what it was he wanted, he said words that
sounded like soup with the alphabet stirred in.
"Heavens!" says Mis' Sykes. "He ain't English."
And that's what we all concluded. He wore what we'd never seen, he
spoke what we couldn't speak, he come from nobody knew where.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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