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 scaled 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.

Oh, 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 an 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