A word with Mr. Holley, one of the inspectors, settled the whole thing.  It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the class known as shiftless, who had sealed his fate by marrying a dumb wife, who was at that moment ironing in the laundry.  Before I left Stafford, I had hired both for five years.  We had applied to Judge Pynchon, then the probate judge at Springfield, to change the name of Dennis Shea to Frederic Ingham.  We had explained to the Judge, what was the precise truth, that an eccentric gentleman wished to adopt Dennis, under this new name, into his family.  It never occurred to him that Dennis might be more than fourteen years old.  And thus, to shorten this preface, when we returned at night to my parsonage at Naguadavick, there entered Mrs. Ingham, her new dumb laundress, myself, who am Mr. Frederic Ingham, and my double, who was Mr. Frederic Ingham by as good right as I.

O the fun we had the next morning in shaving his beard to my pattern, cutting his hair to match mine, and teaching him how to wear and how to take off gold-bowed spectacles!  Really, they were electro-plate, and the glass was plain (for the poor fellow’s eyes were excellent).  Then in four successive afternoons I taught him four speeches.  I had found these would be quite enough for the supernumerary-Sepoy line of life, and it was well for me they were; for though he was good-natured, he was very shiftless, and it was, as our national proverb says, “like pulling teeth,” to teach him.  But at the end of the next week he could say, with quite my easy and frisky air,—­

1.  “Very well, thank you.  And you?” This for a answer to casual salutations.

2.  “I am very glad you liked it.”

3.  “There has been so much said, and, on the whole, so well said, that I will not occupy the time.”

4.  “I agree, in general, with my friend the other side of the room.”

At first I had a feeling that I was going to be at great cost for clothing him.  But it proved, of course, at once, that, whenever he was out, I should be at home.  And I went, during the bright period of his success, to so few of those awful pageants which require a black dress-coat and what the ungodly call, after Mr. Dickens, a white choker, that in the happy retreat of my own dressing-gowns and jackets my days went by as happily and cheaply as those of another Thalaba.  And Polly declares there was never a year when the tailoring cost so little.  He lived (Dennis, not Thalaba) in his wife’s room over the kitchen.  He had orders never to show himself at that window.  When he appeared in the front of the house, I retired to my sanctissimum and my dressing-gown.  In short, the Dutchman and his wife, in the old weather-box, had not less to do with each other than he and I. He made the furnace-fire and split the wood before daylight; then he went to sleep again, and slept late; then came for orders, with a red silk bandanna tied round his head, with his overalls on, and his dress-coat and spectacles off.  If we happened to be interrupted, no one guessed that he was Frederic Ingham as well as I; and, in the neighborhood, there grew up an impression that the minister’s Irishman worked day-times in the factory-village at New Coventry.  After I had given him his orders, I never saw him till the next day.