Little Poems in Prose

XIX THE POOR MAN’S TOY I SHOULD like to tell you of an innocent amusement. There are so few amusements that are not guilty ones! When you go out in the morning with the intention of lounging in the streets, fill your pockets with halfpenny toys, such as the flat Punch, moved by a single thread; blacksmiths beating the anvil; the horseman and his steed whose tail is a whistle. And, as you walk by the inns below the trees, make presents of them to poor stranger children that you may meet. You will see their eyes grow great out of all knowl- edge. At first they will not dare to accept; it will seem too good to be true; then their hands will fasten lively on the present, and they will dash off as cats do, who go far away to eat the morsel you have given them, having learned to distrust man. On a road, behind the pale of a large gar- den, at the end of which shone the whiteness of a pretty house bathing in the sun, was a