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It is a great satisfaction to a stranger who does not know the language to be sure that if he shows a name on his guide-book to the first street-urchin he meets, the boy will understand it and will try to direct him by gestures. Talking of Catholics and Calvinists, we arrived at the dunes, and, although we were near the coast, we could not see the ocean.
He was a lively, active city boy, but the closest he had ever seen an airship was a distance away and five hundred feet up in the air. Now, with big wonder eyes he stared at the strange appearing machine. His fingers moved restlessly, like a street-urchin surveying an automobile and longing to blow its horn. The man in charge of the place attracted his attention, too.
I saw her enter another shop, baby linen shop or some nonsense of that sort, so it was plain for what she had popped her watch; but what cared I? I continued to sing most beautifully. I lunged gayly with my stick at a lamp-post and missed it, whereat a street-urchin grinned, and I winked at him and slipped twopence down his back.
A street-urchin teasing an old woman is no new sight, but the nimbleness, spirit, grace and gentleness of this young Pickle, the impossibility of guessing what he would do or where he would be next, and the fine dramatic rage of the beldame, who looked like one of Michael Angelo's Fates, kept us standing and staring at the two until the fun was over as if we had been at a play.
There are four of them: Mohammed, the most intelligent, the most gifted of them all, the great mathematician of the party; his double, Zarif, a little less advanced, less tractable, craftier, but at the same time more fanciful, more spontaneous and capable of occasional disconcerting sallies; next, Hanschen, a little Shetland pony, hardly bigger than a Newfoundland dog, the street-urchin of the band, always quivering with excitement, roguish, flighty, uncertain and passionate, but ready in a moment to work you out the most difficult addition and multiplication sums with a furious scrape of the hoof; and lastly the latest arrival, the plump and placid Berto, an imposing black stallion, quite blind and lacking the sense of smell.
While the matter still seemed indefinite, it was set at rest by the advice of an obliging street-urchin, who volunteered his information with appropriate brevity and directness: "Try the door. If it's loose, Daddy Mickley's home, sure. If it's locked, 'taint no use of knockin', for he's out." Thus instructed, I tried the door.
The city-dweller of to-day lives in a subdued and mechanically controlled region whose every clank and rattle speaks of routine and order. The myth-making faculty of the street-urchin has little to feed upon all is so obvious and open to inspection.
Cuckoo flushed scarlet and uttered words of the pavement. Any one hearing her then must have put her down as utterly unredeemed and irredeemable, a harridan to bandy foul language with a cabman, or to outvie a street-urchin bumped against by a rival in the newspaper trade. She covered Mrs.
He could not remember a time when he could not sing a song or make a speech. That he developed all the alertness and readiness of tongue and fist of the street-urchin there is no doubt. When he was taken into a monastery at eighteen years of age, the fact that he was a good singer and a most successful beggar were points of excellence that were not overlooked.
The three gentlemen, with tears of merriment still in their eyes, reached a corner and disappeared. "Mister," said a child, trotting along under Frowenfeld's elbow, the odd English of the New Orleans street-urchin was at that day just beginning to be heard "Mister, dey got some blood on de back of you' hade!" But Frowenfeld hurried on groaning with mental anguish. It was the year 1804.
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