For he had entered this country j-less, and j-less he remained, using y in place of j with such smiling confidence that it was “all right” that no one had the heart to sternly put him in the wrong by correcting him. My wise, young friend smiled quite brightly upon him, and when he had passed, demanded of me all I knew about him, “because he was such a dear--and so individual--you know!”
I assured her there was nothing to tell--that he was simply an ignorant but honest man, who by the hardest work and almost incredible economy had risen to wealth, and she surprised me by replying “that there was more than that in his face, even for her, a stranger, to see--and what was the secret of the almost child-like gentleness of his clear, blue eyes?”
Whereupon, we lunched in a quiet corner of a quiet room and over many--too many--cups of coffee, I told her that his name was Knights--Jacobus Knights--and I had made his acquaintance while I was still so young that the salient features of my own personality were the length of my braids and the whiteness of my aprons. He used to rear vegetables and then sell them from a cart, which he pushed when it was full and dragged when it was empty. Being sent after him one day by a lady, I called out lustily: “Boy--boy--you boy! Stop--stop--I say!” thus making the mistake that many an older and wiser person made daily, and one that was greatly facilitated by the tailless jacket and flat cap the little man wore. Really, it savored of the uncanny to thus address a question to the back of childhood and receive your answer from the unshaven lip of maturity. He seemed to be quite used to the error, and only laughed and said: “Dat is noddings--youst noddings at all! Whad I make mit you--onion--squash--eh, whad now?”
Two years later I came to live on S---- street, and right opposite, little Mr. Knights had his little play-house of a home, his doll of a blond baby, and his tremendous wife. No, her size was not the result of comparison, she was really a tremendously big woman, from whose deep chest and strong, column-like throat there issued the thin, little voice of a complaining, “cheeping” chick too weak to break its imprisoning shell. She was a spring of pure Dutch undefiled. Not one English sentence could she command, but she was a friendly creature, and hobnobbed deprecatingly but successfully with her neighbors through the medium of a ponderous but expressive and ever-smiling pantomime.