Apropos of the Census
If they do not call for the census papers in our street soon, we shall have a revolution. The crisis has arrived in Ryan’s already. Mrs. Ryan’s mother came a day or two before the numbering of the people to assist Mrs. Ryan through a difficulty not altogether unconnected with the census. The enumerator hadn’t called for the paper on Tuesday last, and on that morning there was another visitor at Ryan’s. Mrs. Ryan and her mother insist that the latest comer must be added to the list. Ryan, who is conscientious to a decimal point, argues that the important personage in question has no moral right to figure in the population for another ten years. After an animated and personal discussion on this point, Ryan retired to his study, took out the census paper, and filled up the last column by appending to his sainted mother-in-law’s name the classical expression “idiot!” That lady got hold of the document later, and she filled up Ryan’s own blank with the declaration that he was a brute, blind, deaf, dumb, and a dangerous lunatic. Ryan secured the blue pages afterwards, and what pen-and-ink profanity he was guilty of will not be known until the collector comes round. We expect something rather lively on that occasion.
Brown has got his form filled up all right. There was a preliminary difficulty between himself and his better four-fifths as to which of them had the greater claim to be entitled “Head of the Family.” As she threatened to sit on him, if he resisted her mandate, and her sitting weight is two hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois, he consented to a compromise by which she appears as “Head of the Family,” and his dignity is maintained by the insertion of “Ditto, ditto,—occasionally.”
If Timmins’s paper be not called for soon he will occupy the abnormal position of being the husband of a lady as yet unborn. Their eldest is fifteen, and duly entered as of that age, yet Mrs. T. insisted on figuring as thirty, and to avoid hysterics Timmins consented to let her appear as of that matronly but not too far advanced period of adolescence. She has had charge of the sheet since, and when it was not called for on Monday she studied her charms in the mirror for an hour or so, and thought appearances justified her in knocking two years off her record. On Tuesday, a lady friend congratulated her on her youthful figure, and she abbreviated her years by half a decade. She has been at that column every day since, and by latest accounts was only two years ahead of her eldest born. In another week she should be fit for spoon and bottle-feeding.
The worst case of all, however, is that of poor Robinson. Robinson is the family man of our street. He has been adding to the population of it for a quarter of a century with a regularity that is inspiring. He is a commercial traveller, and he seldom returns from a lengthy journey without the expectation of an introduction to another of his name and lineage. He don’t know half his offspring. From the moment he turns the corner into our street on his return from a month’s absence he is the central figure of an imposing procession. A territorial army of young Robinsons surround him, climb on his shoulders, take up quarters in his arms, cling to his coat-tails, impede his footsteps, follow four deep in his wake, and make the welkin ring with filial expressions of welcome. He has shirked the fearful ordeal of reckoning his responsibilities until the fatal exigencies of the census have brought it home to him. The only occasions on which he has obtained a faint idea of his success as a father have been those momentous periods when the baptismal signboard of the latest Robinson has had to be hung out. “What shall we call sonny?” has whispered the joint shareholder in his live-stock. “Oh, John.” “But we’ve got John already.” “Oh, then, name him Peter or Theodore—Theodore sounds well with Robinson.” “But we have had Peter fifteen years, my dear, and it was only yesterday, you know, that we feared Theodore had the measles.” Then Robinson would became irritated. “Hang it,” he would exclaim, “do you think I am a Thom’s Directory, or an army list, or a dictionary of scriptural names? What name are you short of? Give him that.” Then Mrs. R. would begin the catalogue. “We have John, and Peter, and Theodore, and Joe’s with his aunt, and Tom’s at his grandmother’s, and there’s Philip, and James, and little Edmund, and—” Then Robinson would fly out with his fingers in his ears, and knock over two or three of the middle-sized ones in the lobby, and be followed by the screams of the smaller ones to the door, and meet some of the eldest “sparking” in the lane; and when he entered some refuge to drown reflection in a flowing bowl, he would hear one tall stripling whisper to another, “Here’s father,” and his end of the counter would be left deserted. It was too much to think of, and he didn’t, as a rule.
But he couldn’t escape the census. He was at home. His feelings as a father and his duty as head of the household demanded that that paper should be filled up. Anna Maria couldn’t assist—there was another Robinson en route. So he entered the parlor on Sunday night, and sent the housemaid round to summon the clan. They came—in twos, in threes, in fours, and the last batch was half a dozen. He gazed upon the throng, and as he traced his nose in this one, his mouth in that, and the cast in his eye leered at him all round the room from other eyes, he felt like Noah—only Noah would have been nowhere with an ark of the dimensions used at the time of the Flood. He commenced his enumeration, and before any appreciable diminution had been made in the numbers present by the retirement of those whose descriptive particulars had been entered, his form, with its fifteen spaces, pegged out. The room was still full. Two or three of the boys were playing leap-frog in one corner, a few girls were dressing and comparing dolls in another, the twins were fighting under the table, the youngest but two was struggling with the coal scuttle, and some of them hadn’t come home from church yet. Then Robinson felt the full extent of his marital liabilities, and he laughed. “Ha! ha!” he yelled. “What’s the use of this bit o’ paper? Send me a volume, four hundred pages, bound in morocco, forty names on a page! I’ll fill ’em up. Order up your whole staff of enumerators, two or three barrels of ink, and a goods train to carry out the returns. I’m ready. There’s Robinsons enough round to make a census of their own. Oh, let us be joyful!” Then he began to dance, sang “A father’s early love,” and went up-stairs to swallow the latest arrival. It’s a pity Robinson was at home this census time.