After the vivid impression of Stevie\'s death, the days are a blank. Memory only revives upon a fresh encounter with my kind.

A little boy, a friend of my parents, was sent down to nurse\'s to gain strength by a first-hand acquaintance with cows\' milk and the life of the fields. Louie was an exciting friend. He had the queerest face in the world, like that of an old and wrinkled baby\'s, for mouth a comical slit, and two twinkling grey eyes as small as a pig\'s. His hair was white, and he grinned from morning till night, so that, like the Cheshire cat, he rises before me an eternal grin.

He taught me a delightful accomplishment, which afforded me entertainment for several months—the repetition of nursery rhymes. He possessed a book of this fanciful literature, and his private store as well was inexhaustible.
 
We spent a day of misery together once because he could not remember the end of one that began—
"There was an old man who supposed
The street door was partially closed."

For nights I dreamed of that old man, and wondered and wondered what happened because of his error about the street door. I beheld him, grey-haired, with a nightcap on his hair, with a dressing-gown wrapped round him and held in front by one hand, while the other grasped a candle, and the old man looked fearfully over his shoulder at the door. I must have seen something to suggest this clear picture, but I cannot tell what it was.

Sometimes his face underwent all sorts of transformations, resembled in turn every animal I had ever seen and several new monsters I was unacquainted with. The eyes changed places with the mouth and the ears distorted themselves into noses. Before I had done with him, he had become quite a wonderful old man.

Our great amusement was to repeat the rhymes in a way of our own invention, taking turns to be chief and echo. This was how we did it:[Pg 35]—
Louie.   "There was an old man of the
Angela.   Hague
Louie.   Whose ideas were extremely
Angela.   vague.
Louie.   He built a
Angela.   balloon
Louie.   To examine the
Angela.   moon,
Louie.   This curious old man of the
Angela.   Hague."

My passionate admiration of the courage of the young lady of Norway made me always insist on taking the principal part when it came to her turn. The neighbors used to drop in of an evening, and add the enthusiasm of an audience to our own. They were specially proud of me as almost native-grown, and my eagerness to show off the attractions of the young lady of Norway generally resulted in my suppressing Louie\'s final rhyme. This was what we made of it:—
Angela. "There was a young lady of
Louie.     Norway
Angela. Who occasionally sat in the
Louie.     doorway;
Angela. When the door squeezed her
Louie.     flat,
Angela. She exclaimed, \'What of
Louie.     that?\'
Angela. This courageous young lady of
Louie.     Norway."
 
Poor Louie, I learnt years afterwards, went to the dogs, and was despatched to the Colonies by an irate father. He was last heard of as a music-hall star at Sydney.

What sends bright and laughing children forth to a life of shame? Louie was the kindest little comrade on earth, unselfish, devoted, and of a tenderness only surpassed by my nurse\'s. Was this not proved when I began to droop and pine, missing the picture of Stevie kneeling on his sofa and staring out of the window?

I cannot say how long after Stevie\'s death it was before this want broke out as a fell disease. I worried everybody about the absence of that tragic face, and plied nurse with unanswerable questions. Neither Mary Jane nor the brindled cat, not even the applewoman and her tempting trays, nor the pond, nor my new terrier-pup that often washed my face, had power to comfort me.

I went about disconsolate, and was glad of a listener to whom it was all fresh, to discourse upon heaven and the queer means that were taken to despatch little children thither—an ugly box, when wings would be so much prettier.

Louie listened to me as I, with a burning cheek, told the roll of my sorrows and unfolded[Pg 37] my ideas of the mysteries that surrounded me. Louie was not an intelligent listener, but he made up for his deficiency by an exquisite sense of comradeship. He would hold my hand and protest in the loudest voice that it was a shame, the while I suspect his mind ran on those nursery rhymes. But he loved me, there can be no doubt of that. I think he meant to marry me when we grew up.

I know when illness and a dreadful cough overtook me, he would let me lie on the floor with my head in his lap, while the exertion of coughing drew blood from my ears and nose. This too, he cried, was an awful shame.

I once saw him watch me through a convulsion with tears in his eyes, and I was immediately thrilled with the satisfaction of being so interesting and so deeply commiserated. It filled me with the same artistic emotion that followed my appreciation of the melancholy of my wordless singing.

Deep down in the heart of childhood—even bitterly suffering childhood—is this dramatic element, this love of sensation, this vanity of artist. So much of childhood is, after all, make-believe, unconscious acting. We are ill, and we cannot help noting the effect of our illness upon[Pg 38] others. The amount of sympathy we evoke in grown-up people is the best evidence of our success as experimental artists with life. Even when we cower under a bed to weep away from our kind, we secretly hope that God or our guardian angel is watching us and feeling intensely sorry for us; and our finest conception of punishment of cruel elders is their finding us unexpectedly dead, and their being consumed with remorse for their flagrant injustice to such virtue as ours.

Who can limit the part as admiring audience a child condemns his guardian angel to play? For him, when humanity is cold and unobservant—as humanity too often is in the eyes of childhood—does he so gallantly play the martyr, the hero, the sufferer in proud silence. For his admiration did a little sister of mine once put her hand in the fire. She thought it was heroic, like the early Christians, and hoped her guardian angel would applaud, while common elders shouted in angry alarm.

Ah, never prate so idly of the artlessness and the guilelessness of children. They are as full of vanity and innocent guile and all the arts and graces as the puppies and kittens we adore.

How much, for instance, had the hope of[Pg 39] praise and admiration to do with Louie\'s magnanimous kindness in that affair of the gipsies? I lay ill and exhausted from coughing on the sofa when he rushed in, panting with eagerness, to tell me that the gipsies had arrived over-night and were camped on the green, where they had a merry-go-round. I had never seen a gipsy, but Mary Jane had, and she often told me the most surprising things about them—how dark they were, how queerly they spoke, and how romantic they looked, like strange people in story-books. Of course I pined to see them, and the thought that I was chained to my sofa, when outside the world was all agog, and rapture awaited happier children upon the green, filled my eyes with tears.

I turned my face to the wall and wept bitterly. My heart was heavy with the sombre hate of Cain, and when I looked gloweringly at the blest little Abel by my side, he looked quite as miserable as my evil, envious heart could desire. His comic face underwent a variety of contortions before finally he made up his mind to blurt out an offer to forego the pleasures of the green, and stay with me.

But I was not a selfish child, and generosity always spurred me to emulation. Besides, I was[Pg 40] already greatly comforted by the extent of Louie\'s sympathy, so I ordered him off to see the gipsies, and come back and tell me what a merry-go-round was like.

Still I did not mend, in spite of all nurse\'s care and tenderness, and it was decided to remove me to town. This was the decision of my stepfather, who was probably nervous since Stevie had dropped out of life in that quick and quiet way.

How well I remember the last day among all my dear friends! Mary Jane, Louie, and I, hand in hand, walked about all our favourite spots. The applewoman gave me an entire trayful of crab-apples, and wished I might come back with my rosy cheeks. I asked her to kiss me, and then she thrust a bun into my hand, and said huskily, "God bless you, my little lady!"

We went across to Mary Jane\'s, and I had a conviction that my heart was broken. I was going away into the land of the ogres and witches, and though I should probably be happy at last, since all things come right in children\'s tales, vague terror held me at the prospect of the unknown trials that awaited me. Mary Jane\'s mamma gave me raspberry vinegar and my tears mingled with the syrup. I asked to be let look[Pg 41] once more at the views of New York, and then asked her if she would feel very sorry at my death.

They were still consoling me, and I was sobbing wildly in the arms of Mary Jane\'s mamma, while Louie relieved his stricken soul by protesting repeatedly that "it was an awful shame," when nurse and Jim Cochrane, in his Sunday clothes, came to carry me off to the car. All the village flocked to see me off, and breathed cordial love and benediction upon my departure.

Kindly Irish peasants, with their pretty speech and pretty manners! Is there any other race whose common people can throw such warmth and natural grace into greetings and farewell? Big-hearted, foolish, emotional children, upon whose sympathetic faces, at their ugliest, still play the smiles and frowns, the lights and shadows of expressive and variable childhood. How they cheered and soothed me with their kind words, their little gifts, their packages of comfits and posies, a blue-and-white mug with somebody else\'s name in gilt letters upon it, and a tiny plate with a dog in a circle of fascinating white knobs.

This was the end of my brief sovereignty. Though of those old associations, for which I[Pg 42] was destined to yearn so passionately many a year, memory may have become so dim as to leave only a trace of blurred silhouettes upon an indistinct background emerging from a haze of multiplied experience, I like to think that I owe to that bright start the humour and courage that have served to help me through a clouded life.