Bangladeshi-Bengali.Com: Online Story. The Nice People.

"They certainly are nice people," I assented to my wife's observation,

using the colloquial phrase with a consciousness that it was anything

but "nice" English, "and I'll bet that their three children are better

brought up than most of----"

"_Two_ children," corrected my wife.

"Three, he told me."

"My dear, she said there were _two_."

"He said three."

"You've simply forgotten. I'm _sure_ she told me they had only two--a

boy and a girl."

"Well, I didn't enter into particulars."

"No, dear, and you couldn't have understood him. Two children."

"All right," I said; but I did not think it was all right. As a

near-sighted man learns by enforced observation to recognize persons

at a distance when the face is not visible to the normal eye, so the

man with a bad memory learns, almost unconsciously, to listen

carefully and report accurately. My memory is bad; but I had not had

time to forget that Mr. Brewster Brede had told me that afternoon that

he had three children, at present left in the care of his

mother-in-law, while he and Mrs. Brede took their summer vacation.

"Two children," repeated my wife; "and they are staying with his aunt

Jenny."

"He told me with his mother-in-law," I put in. My wife looked at me

with a serious expression. Men may not remember much of what they are

told about children; but any man knows the difference between an aunt

and a mother-in-law.

"But don't you think they're nice people?" asked my wife.

"Oh, certainly," I replied. "Only they seem to be a little mixed up

about their children."

"That isn't a nice thing to say," returned my wife. I could not deny

it.

* * * * *

And yet, the next morning, when the Bredes came down and seated

themselves opposite us at table, beaming and smiling in their natural,

pleasant, well-bred fashion, I knew, to a social certainty, that they

were "nice" people. He was a fine-looking fellow in his neat

tennis-flannels, slim, graceful, twenty-eight or thirty years old,

with a Frenchy pointed beard. She was "nice" in all her pretty

clothes, and she herself was pretty with that type of prettiness which

outwears most other types--the prettiness that lies in a rounded

figure, a dusky skin, plump, rosy cheeks, white teeth and black eyes.

She might have been twenty-five; you guessed that she was prettier

than she was at twenty, and that she would be prettier still at forty.

And nice people were all we wanted to make us happy in Mr. Jacobus's

summer boarding-house on top of Orange Mountain. For a week we had

come down to breakfast each morning, wondering why we wasted the

precious days of idleness with the company gathered around the Jacobus

board. What joy of human companionship was to be had out of Mrs. Tabb

and Miss Hoogencamp, the two middle-aged gossips from Scranton,

Pa.--out of Mr. and Mrs. Biggle, an indurated head-bookkeeper and his

prim and censorious wife--out of old Major Halkit, a retired business

man, who, having once sold a few shares on commission, wrote for

circulars of every stock company that was started, and tried to induce

every one to invest who would listen to him? We looked around at those

dull faces, the truthful indices of mean and barren minds, and decided

that we would leave that morning. Then we ate Mrs. Jacobus's biscuit,

light as Aurora's cloudlets, drank her honest coffee, inhaled the

perfume of the late azaleas with which she decked her table, and

decided to postpone our departure one more day. And then we wandered

out to take our morning glance at what we called "our view"; and it

seemed to us as if Tabb and Hoogencamp and Halkit and the Biggleses

could not drive us away in a year.

I was not surprised when, after breakfast, my wife invited the Bredes

to walk with us to "our view." The Hoogencamp-Biggle-Tabb-Halkit

contingent never stirred off Jacobus's veranda; but we both felt that

the Bredes would not profane that sacred scene. We strolled slowly

across the fields, passed through the little belt of woods and, as I

heard Mrs. Brede's little cry of startled rapture, I motioned to Brede

to look up.

"By Jove!" he cried, "heavenly!"

We looked off from the brow of the mountain over fifteen miles of

billowing green, to where, far across a far stretch of pale blue lay a

dim purple line that we knew was Staten Island. Towns and villages lay

before us and under us; there were ridges and hills, uplands and

lowlands, woods and plains, all massed and mingled in that great

silent sea of sunlit green. For silent it was to us, standing in the

silence of a high place--silent with a Sunday stillness that made us

listen, without taking thought, for the sound of bells coming up from

the spires that rose above the tree-tops--the tree-tops that lay as

far beneath us as the light clouds were above us that dropped great

shadows upon our heads and faint specks of shade upon the broad sweep

of land at the mountain's foot.

"And so that is _your_ view?" asked Mrs. Brede, after a moment; "you

are very generous to make it ours, too."

Then we lay down on the grass, and Brede began to talk, in a gentle

voice, as if he felt the influence of the place. He had paddled a

canoe, in his earlier days, he said, and he knew every river and creek

in that vast stretch of landscape. He found his landmarks, and pointed

out to us where the Passaic and the Hackensack flowed, invisible to

us, hidden behind great ridges that in our sight were but combings of

the green waves upon which we looked down. And yet, on the further

side of those broad ridges and rises were scores of villages--a little

world of country life, lying unseen under our eyes.