of Tom Sawyer when he told tall stories, invented wild, complicated, and romantic schemes, when none was necessary, or used big words to impress his friends, the nigger Jim, or Huckleberry Finn.
Thus, the two young men would stay in “Pothillippo’s” until late at night when the place closed, drinking that wonderful “Chianti de la maison,” so preciously and lovingly described, which was really nothing but “dago red,” raw, new, and instantaneous in its intoxication, filled with headaches and depression for to-morrow morning, but filled now with the mild, soaring, jubilant and triumphant drunkenness that only youth can know.
And they would leave this place of Latin mystery and languor at one o’clock in the morning, Frank shouting in a high drunken voice before he left, “Nino! Nino!—Il faut quelque chose à boire avant de partir—Nino!—Nino!—Encora! Encora!”—pronouncing his last Italian word victoriously.
“Mais si, signor,” Nino would answer, smiling somewhat anxiously. “Du vin?”
“Mais non, mais non, Nino” Frank would cry violently. “Pas de vin—du wis-kee, Nino! Du wis-kee!”
Then they would gulp down drinks of the raw and powerful beverage to which the name of whisky had been given in that era, and leaving a dim blur of lights, a few dim blots of swarthy, anxiously smiling faces behind them, they would reel dangerously down the rickety stairs and out into the narrow, twisted streets, the old grimed web of sleeping quietness, the bewildering, ancient, and whited streets of Boston.
Above them, in the cool sweet skies of night, the great moons of the springtime, and New England, blazed with a bare, a lovely and enchanted radiance. And around them the great city and its thousand narrow twisted streets lay anciently asleep beneath that blazing moon, and from the harbour came the sound of ships, the wasting, fresh, half-rotten harbour-smells, filled with the thought of ships, the sea, the proud exultancy of voyages. And out of the cobbled streets and from the old grimed buildings—yes! from the very breast and bareness of that springtime moon and those lovely lilac skies, there came somehow—God knows how—all of the sweet wildness of New England in the month of May, the smell of the earth, the sudden green, the glorious blossoms—
