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While thus seated near the threshold, an urchin of the family approached the door, but catching a sight of the strange guest, ran off screaming with terror and ensconced himself behind the long straw at the back of the hut.
Finding that the purchaser of the grocery was a female, he went with the urchin before her, and expressed a hope that she would intercede with the poor boy's master, in order to prevent his being overweighted in future. "Sir," said the dame, after the manner of Tisiphone, frowning upon him, "I buy my sugar, and have nothing to do with the man's manner of sending it."
Now it is equally notorious, that such secret triumph will often betray itself by a smile, or wink, or some other sign from the chuckling urchin, which proves any thing but that the lie was gratuitous. No, not even a child can love a lie purely for its own sake; he would else love it in another, which is against fact.
Now, as I have no motive but to attempt to record the truth, it is my duty to set down quite frankly that I believe the Urchin showed more enthusiasm over the stone and the robin than over any of the amazements that succeeded them. I suppose the reason for that is plain. These two objects had some understandable relation with his daily life.
Perhaps he overrated the power of his pen perhaps it would have required more than mere ink to persuade his friends to disbelieve their own senses, and see a portly citizen of over fifty packed into the frame of a chubby urchin of fourteen. But, at all events, no one's faith was put to so hard a test those letters were never written.
Pressing one of the beads with his even white teeth, the tiny glass snapped into fragments, some of which flew several feet away. The youngster was startled and glanced up at Victor, as if expecting a reproof. The lad pleasantly shook his head to signify that the present did not form a staple article of food, and then the urchin slipped off the pile of furs and stood upon his sturdy legs.
There before him, bright and clear as ever, were the scenes of his boyhood the school-forms defaced with many a rude cutting of names and dates, the master knitting his shaggy brows and tapping meaningly with his ruler upon the awful desk while some white haired urchin floundered through an ill-learned task and his classmates tittered at his blunders. Dear old classmates!
The mother went away tranquilly, seeing the youngster's future assured, because this man so lavish in violence was equally so in generosity. In time there would be a bit of land and a good flock of sheep for the urchin. These adoptions at first aroused in Misia Petrona a little rebellion the only ones of her life; but the centaur soon reduced her to terrified silence.
"Yup, I guess that's how it happened," answered a voice close beside her, and she jumped almost out of her shoes in her surprise, for unconsciously she had spoken her thoughts aloud, and a merry-faced urchin, sprawled in the shade of a low-limbed box-elder, had answered her.
As for the fosse, it sank long ages ago to the level and capacity of a common ditch, and was almost hidden from view by the overhanging boughs and branches of the park trees on the opposite side, and the half- decayed trunks of former monarchs of the forest that filled its bed a ditch covered with a superstratum of slimy, green water, lank weeds, and rank vegetation; and wherein, at flood time, urchin anglers could fish for eels and sticklebats, and, at ebb, the village ducks disport themselves and mudlarks play.
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