Little Poems in Prose

beautiful, fresh-looking child, dressed in those country clothes which are so full of coquetry. Luxury, freedom from care, and the custom of seeing wealth on all sides of them, make these children so pretty that one might think them made of another clay than the children of the middle or the poorer class. Beside him lay in the grass a splendid toy, as fresh as its master; varnished, gilded, dressed in a purple robe and covered with plumes and beads; but the child was paying no attention to his chosen toy. And here is what he was looking at. On the other side of the pale, on the road, among the thistles and net- tles, there was another child, dirty, puny, soot- begrimed; one of those outcast brats, whose beauty an unbiased eye would discover, if, as the connoisseur’s eye divines an ideal painting under a coachmaker’s varnish, he were to clean it from the repugnant rust of wretched- ness. Across these symbolic bars that keep apart these two worlds—the main road and the cas- tle—the poor child showed the rich child his own toy, which the latter greedily examined as a rare and unknown object. Now the toy which the little gutter-snipe was teasing, worrying, and shaking in a wire box, was a living rat. His parents, doubtless for economy’s sake, had