The boy Bog had now become, professionally, a creature of the night. He was abroad at the, same hours as the burglars and garroters, and other owls and weasels of society. Fink & Co. (Bog was the Co.) had secured the bill posting for three theatres and one negro-minstrel hall. This they called their heavy business. Carrying the huge damp placards, had already given to Bog's shoulders a manifest tendency to roundness, which he was constantly trying to overcome by straightening up. Fink, who was the veteran bill poster of the town, was as round shouldered as a hod carrier. But Bog thought of somebody, and stood as nearly erect as he could.
The firm also obtained rather more than their share of ordinary bill posting, from doctors, drygoods dealers, and other people who find their profit in continually addressing the public from the summit of a dead wall, or the muddy level of the curbstones. This they called their light business. As it required neither strength nor practised dexterity of manipulation, the firm intrusted it to assistants.
There were a dozen of these, all stout, hulking young fellows nearly as old as Bog. They took a fancy to bill posting, and worked industriously and faithfully at it, because it was nocturnal, mysterious, romantic. The half dollar which they each received for a night's labor, enabled them to lounge about the streets all day in glorious indolence. Sometimes there was a prodigious rush of business, and then the firm were obliged to hire an extra force of boys.
Once, when a quack undertook to take the public by storm with his "New and Sure Cure for Dyspepsia," Fink & Co. put a colored poster as large as a dining table on every wall and high fence below Sixty-first street; small oblong bills every ten feet along the curbstones of Broadway, Bowery, Wall street, Fulton street, Cortlandt street, and Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Madison, and Lexington Avenues; besides throwing cheap circulars, folded, into the front yards of about four thousand residences in the fashionable quarters of the town--all in a single night. This immense job took one hundred boys.
Bog had been in this partnership since the first of January. It was now near the close of March. The firm had been very successful. Bog had comfortably supported himself and his aunt (whose rheumatism got worse in steady proportion as his business improved), and had invested more than two hundred and fifty dollars in a Wall-street savings bank.
With this money at his disposal, Bog might have thrown away the greasy cap and old coat and trowsers, spotted with paste, in which he pursued his occupation. But when Bog was at his business, he was not above his business. And he felt none the less attached to his old clothes because they were two inches too short in the legs and arms, and pinched him a little in all directions.
But Bog had a better suit, made of neat gray cloth, which he wore upon occasions. These occasions happened daily between three and four P.M. During that interval, it always fell out that Bog had no work to do which he could not postpone as well as not. And whether it rained or shone, the occasions brought him, like an inexorable fate, through the street where Miss Pillbody's school was situated. He would first stride smartly up the opposite sidewalk, whistling, and cast ardent glances at the lower windows of Miss Pillbody's school, shaded by green curtains with gold borders.
After going two blocks in that direction, he would cross the street, whistling yet, and march boldly up the other sidewalk, past Miss Pillbody's school, as on an enemy. But if there had been anybody to watch him closely--as there was not on that thronged street--that body would have seen that Bog's cheeks began to blush, and his eyes to be cast down, and his whistle to be fainter, as he hurried by the neat three-story brick building with the polished doorplate and handsome curtains.
Then he would loiter for a while in front of McFeeter's grocery, two corners remote, and gaze from that safe distance with intrepidity upon the abode of enchantment; after which he would screw his courage up to the point of marching past the house back and forth again, and would then resume his position at McFeeter's, and wait until four P.M., or about that time, when the envied door of Miss Pillbody's establishment would open, and an angel would dazzle upon his sight, with a music book in her hand instead of a harp, and a jaunty little chip bonnet on her head instead of a golden crown. If the harp and crown had suddenly taken their proper places, and a pair of spangled wings had blossomed right out of her shoulders, and the radiant creature, thus equipped, had spread her pinions and soared up to heaven, the boy Bog would hardly have been surprised. As this angel came down the happy front steps to the blessed pavement (Bog's mind supplying these adjectives), Bog would color up, and sneak off at his best walking pace in the opposite direction. He felt that, if Pet ever saw him, and should ask him what he was doing in that neighborhood, he should melt away in perspiring confusion on the spot.
He called at Mr. Minford's twice a week, to indulge in the hollow form of asking if he could do anything for him. There he confronted Pet, with that trembling figure and those averted eyes which an inexperienced thief may show before the man that he has robbed. But Pet knew not of the adoring spy.
One afternoon, the boy Bog had made his second detour, and was approaching the corner of the favored block, when a novel idea struck him. The very night before, Bog had posted bills of the play, "Faint Heart Ne'er Won Fair Lady." The gigantic lettering arose in his mind's eye, like the cross in Constantine's. He had never seen the drama, and he did not know to what extent Ruy Gomez pushed his audacity, and won the Countess by it. But the name of the drama held the moral of it; and the moral, as applied to Bog's case, was: "Stop at this corner, and take a good view of the, house." To do this, in Bog's opinion, was the height of boldness. But he thought of the huge parti-colored lettering, and he did it.
He stopped at the corner, and leaned recklessly against a hydrant. He looked at the house with a deliberation that amazed himself. At the same time, as a matter of instinctive caution, he kept his left leg well out toward the side street, so that he might retreat, should the door suddenly open and disclose the seraphic vision. He consulted his large bull's-eye silver watch (a capital timekeeper), and found that it was half past three o'clock, and he never knew her to be out before four.
This reflection emboldened him. "Faint Heart Ne'er Won Fair Lady," he thought again, and brought back his left leg to an easy position, crossing it with his right one against the hydrant. Then he feasted, with strange composure, upon the house.
Neither Bog nor a much wiser metaphysician could explain it; but the house, and all around it, seemed to be glorified by the loved one within. The newly painted door was bright with love; the polished doorplate and bell handle glistened with love. The name Pillbody looked, somehow, musical and winning, because the owner of that name was the teacher and dear companion of Pet. The carved stone roses over the door seemed to be truly the emblems of love. It was a silly notion; but, in Bog's eyes, love imparted a not unpleasant expression to the grim lions' faces that looked down from the roof. But the green window curtains with gold borders were the most significant symbols of love, in his eyes. Bog felt that curtains of any other color would be wholly out of place in that house. The patch of a garden, scarcely bigger than a bathroom, in front of the house; the single fir tree that grew up in the middle of it; the black iron railing; the door steps, and the pavement--all took their share of beatitude from the joy within. Bog could hear love rustle in the boughs of the young maple, that stood in its long green case like a fancy boot top, at the edge of the sidewalk.