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