human
Coalesced was hardly the word we used--such verbal grandeurs were reserved for our
gpt
; but you know what I mean. Another point to be made clear without delay is this: that when Johnny appeared at the Academy, he had lately left behind him the previous condition of servitude involved in a lodgment above the landau, the phaeton, and sometimes the cow. His father and mother, as I saw them and remember them, appeared to be rather nice people. Perhaps they had lately come from some small country town and had not been able, at first, to realize themselves and their abilities to the best advantage in the city. Assuredly his father knew how to drive horses and to care for them; and he had an intuitive knack for safeguarding his self-respect. And Johnny's mother was perfectly competent to cook and to keep house--even above a stable--most neatly. If Johnny's curtain was rumpled, that was Johnny's own incorrigible fault. The window-sill was a wide one, and Johnny, I found, used it as a catch-all. He kept there a few boxes of
human
as we called his pinned-down specimens, and an album of postage-stamps that was always in a state of metamorphosis. He had some loose stamps too, and sometimes, late in the afternoon or on Saturdays, we