Initial commitHEADmain

12 files changed, 4148 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7b82bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+*.txt text eol=lf
+*.htm text eol=lf
+*.html text eol=lf
+*.md text eol=lf
diff --git a/75655-0.txt b/75655-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..80bcafd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75655-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1888 @@
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75655 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                               MOUFFLOU
+
+
+                           FIFTH IMPRESSION
+
+
+
+
+                        THE CHILDREN’S CLASSICS
+
+
+      Each beautifully illustrated in color and tastefully bound
+
+
+  FRANCESCA AT HINTERWALD
+      By JOHANNA SPYRI
+
+  THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW
+      By WASHINGTON IRVING
+
+  RIP VAN WINKLE
+      By WASHINGTON IRVING
+
+  TALES OF WASHINGTON IRVING’S ALHAMBRA
+      By WASHINGTON IRVING
+        Simplified by Leila H. Cheney
+
+  THE KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER
+      By JOHN RUSKIN
+
+  GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
+      By JONATHAN SWIFT
+        A Voyage to Lilliput
+
+  A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES
+      By ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+  HANS ANDERSEN’S FAIRY TALES
+      Selected
+
+  THE LITTLE LAME PRINCE
+      By MISS MULOCK
+
+  THE ADVENTURES OF A BROWNIE
+      By MISS MULOCK
+
+  J. COLE
+      By EMMA GELLIBRAND
+
+  ALL-TIME TALES
+      Selected. By Homer P. and Elizabeth Lewis
+
+  MONI THE GOAT BOY
+      By JOHANNA SPYRI
+
+  THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN
+      By GEORGE MACDONALD
+
+  THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE
+      By GEORGE MACDONALD
+
+  AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND
+      By GEORGE MACDONALD
+        Simplified by Elizabeth Lewis
+
+  WONDERLAND STORIES
+      Selected
+
+  THE NÜRNBERG STOVE
+      By OUIDA
+
+  A DOG OF FLANDERS
+      By OUIDA
+
+  MOUFFLOU AND OTHER STORIES
+      By OUIDA
+
+
+[Illustration: THEY PLAY WITH MOUFFLOU AND THE POODLE PUPPY HALF THE
+DAY]
+
+
+
+
+                               MOUFFLOU
+                           AND OTHER STORIES
+
+
+
+
+                                  BY
+                           LOUISA DE LA RAMÉ
+                                (OUIDA)
+
+
+
+
+                   _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR BY_
+                             MARIA L. KIRK
+
+
+
+
+                         _AND PEN DRAWINGS BY_
+                           EDMUND H. GARRETT
+
+
+
+
+                        PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
+                       J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+             COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
+
+                  PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
+                    AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
+                        PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+ MOUFFLOU                                                              9
+
+ LAMPBLACK                                                            51
+
+ THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE                                              65
+
+
+
+
+                             ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                               IN COLOR
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+ THEY PLAY WITH MOUFFLOU AND THE POODLE PUPPY HALF THE DAY
+                                                           _Frontispiece_
+
+ “OLD DEPOSIT IS GOING TO BE A SIGN-POST,” THEY CRIED                 57
+
+ ONE DAY THE GARDENER APPROACHED AND STOOD AND LOOKED AT HER          70
+
+
+                             PEN DRAWINGS
+
+ MOUFFLOU ACQUITTED HIMSELF ABLY AS EVER                              21
+
+ “THEN THE MASTER KNEW BEST,” THOUGHT LAMPBLACK                       63
+
+ “PRETTY POLL! OH, SUCH A PRETTY POLL!”                               84
+
+
+
+
+                               MOUFFLOU
+
+
+
+
+                               MOUFFLOU
+
+
+MOUFFLOU’S masters were some boys and girls. They were very poor, but
+they were very merry. They lived in an old, dark, tumble-down place,
+and their father had been dead five years; their mother’s care was
+all they knew; and Tasso was the eldest of them all, a lad of nearly
+twenty, and he was so kind, so good, so laborious, so cheerful, and
+so gentle, that the children all younger than he adored him. Tasso
+was a gardener. Tasso, however, though the eldest and mainly the
+bread-winner, was not so much Moufflou’s master as was little Romolo,
+who was only ten, and a cripple. Romolo, called generally Lolo, had
+taught Moufflou all he knew, and that all was a very great deal, for
+nothing cleverer than was Moufflou had ever walked upon four legs.
+
+Why Moufflou?
+
+Well, when the poodle had been given to them by a soldier who was going
+back to his home in Piedmont, he had been a white woolly creature of
+a year old, and the children’s mother, who was a Corsican by birth,
+had said that he was just like a _moufflon_, as they call sheep
+in Corsica. White and woolly this dog remained, and he became the
+handsomest and biggest poodle in all the city, and the corruption of
+Moufflou from Moufflon remained the name by which he was known; it was
+silly, perhaps, but it suited him and the children, and Moufflou he was.
+
+They lived in an old quarter of Florence, in that picturesque zigzag
+which goes round the grand church of Or San Michele, and which is
+almost more Venetian than Tuscan in its mingling of color, charm,
+stateliness, popular confusion, and architectural majesty. The tall old
+houses are weather-beaten into the most delicious hues; the pavement
+is enchantingly encumbered with peddlers and stalls and all kinds of
+trades going on in the open air, in that bright, merry, beautiful
+Italian custom which, alas, alas! is being driven away by new-fangled
+laws which deem it better for the people to be stuffed up in close,
+stewing rooms without air, and would fain do away with all the
+good-tempered politics and the sensible philosophies and the wholesome
+chatter which the open-street trades and street gossipry encourage, for
+it is good for the populace to _sfogare_ and in no other way can
+it do so one-half so innocently. Drive it back into musty shops, and
+it is driven at once to mutter sedition.... But you want to hear about
+Moufflou.
+
+Well, Moufflou lived here in that high house with the sign of the lamb
+in wrought iron, which shows it was once a warehouse of the old guild
+of the Arte della Lana. They are all old houses here, drawn round about
+that grand church which I called once, and will call again, like a
+mighty casket of oxidized silver. A mighty casket indeed, holding the
+Holy Spirit within it; and with the vermilion and the blue and the
+orange glowing in its niches and its lunettes like enamels, and its
+statues of the apostles strong and noble, like the times in which they
+were created,--St. Peter with his keys, and St. Mark with his open
+book, and St. George leaning on his sword, and others also, solemn and
+austere as they, austere though benign, for do they not guard the White
+Tabernacle of Orcagna within?
+
+The church stands firm as a rock, square as a fortress of stone, and
+the winds and the waters of the skies may beat about it as they will,
+they have no power to disturb its sublime repose. Sometimes I think of
+all the noble things in all our Italy; Or San Michele is the noblest,
+standing there in its stern magnificence, amidst people’s hurrying feet
+and noisy laughter, a memory of God.
+
+The little masters of Moufflou lived right in its shadow, where the
+bridge of stone spans the space between the houses and the church high
+in mid-air: and little Lolo loved the church with a great love. He
+loved it in the morning-time, when the sunbeams turned it into dusky
+gold and jasper; he loved it in the evening-time, when the lights of
+its altars glimmered in the dark, and the scent of its incense came
+out in the street; he loved it in the great feasts, when the huge
+clusters of lilies were borne inside it; he loved it in the solemn
+nights of winter; the flickering gleam of the dull lamps shone on the
+robes of an apostle, or the sculpture of a shield, or the glow of a
+casement-moulding in majolica. He loved it always, and, without knowing
+why, he called it _la mia chiesa_.
+
+Lolo, being lame and of delicate health, was not enabled to go to
+school or to work, though he wove the straw covering of wine-flasks and
+plaited the cane matting with busy fingers. But for the most part he
+did as he liked, and spent most of his time sitting on the parapet of
+Or San Michele, watching the venders of earthenware at their trucks, or
+trotting with his crutch (and he could trot a good many miles when he
+chose) out with Moufflou down a bit of the Stocking-makers’ Street,
+along under the arcades of the Uffizi, and so over the Jewellers’
+Bridge, and out by byways that he knew into the fields on the hill-side
+upon the other bank of Arno. Moufflou and he would spend half the
+day--all the day--out there in daffodil-time; and Lolo would come home
+with great bundles and sheaves of golden flowers, and he and Moufflou
+were happy.
+
+His mother never liked to say a harsh word to Lolo, for he was lame
+through her fault: she had let him fall in his babyhood, and the
+mischief had been done to his hip never again to be undone. So she
+never raised her voice to him, though she did often to the others,--to
+curly-pated Cecco, and pretty black-eyed Dina, and saucy Bice, and
+sturdy Beppo, and even to the good, manly, hard-working Tasso. Tasso
+was the mainstay of the whole, though he was but a gardener’s lad,
+working in the green Cascine at small wages. But all he earned he
+brought home to his mother; and he alone kept in order the lazy,
+high-tempered Sandro, and he alone kept in check Bice’s love of finery,
+and he alone could with shrewdness and care make both ends meet and put
+_minestra_ always in the pot and bread always in the cupboard.
+
+When his mother thought, as she thought indeed almost ceaselessly,
+that with a few months he would be of the age to draw his number,
+and might draw a high one and be taken from her for three years, the
+poor soul believed her very heart would burst and break; and many a
+day at twilight she would start out unperceived and creep into the
+great church and pour her soul forth in supplication before the White
+Tabernacle.
+
+Yet, pray as she would, no miracle could happen to make Tasso free of
+military service: if he drew a fatal number, go he must, even though he
+take all the lives of them to their ruin with him.
+
+One morning Lolo sat as usual on the parapet of the church, Moufflou
+beside him. It was a brilliant morning in September. The men at the
+hand-barrows and at the stalls were selling the crockery, the silk
+handkerchiefs, and the straw hats which form the staple of the commerce
+that goes on round about Or San Michele,--very blithe, good-natured,
+gay commerce, for the most part, not got through, however, of course,
+without bawling and screaming, and shouting and gesticulating, as if
+the sale of a penny pipkin or a twopenny pie-pan were the occasion
+for the exchange of many thousands of pounds sterling and cause for
+the whole world’s commotion. It was about eleven o’clock; the poor
+petitioners were going in for alms to the house of the fraternity of
+San Giovanni Battista; the barber at the corner was shaving a big man
+with a cloth tucked about his chin, and his chair set well out on the
+pavement; the sellers of the pipkins and pie-pans were screaming till
+they were hoarse, “_Un soldo l’uno, due soldi tre!_” big bronze
+bells were booming till they seemed to clang right up to the deep-blue
+sky; some brethren of the Misericordia went by bearing a black bier;
+a large sheaf of glowing flowers--dahlias, zinnias, asters, and
+daturas--was borne through the huge arched door of the church near St.
+Mark and his open book. Lolo looked on at it all, and so did Moufflou,
+and a stranger looked at them as he left the church.
+
+“You have a handsome poodle there, my little man,” he said to Lolo, in
+a foreigner’s too distinct and careful Italian.
+
+“Moufflou is beautiful,” said Lolo, with pride. “You should see him
+when he is just washed; but we can only wash him on Sundays, because
+then Tasso is at home.”
+
+“How old is your dog?”
+
+“Three years old.”
+
+“Does he do any tricks?”
+
+“Does he!” said Lolo, with a very derisive laugh: “Why, Moufflou can do
+anything! He can walk on two legs ever so long; make ready, present,
+and fire; die; waltz; beg, of course; shut a door; make a wheelbarrow
+of himself; there is nothing he will not do. Would you like to see him
+do something?”
+
+“Very much,” said the foreigner.
+
+To Moufflou and to Lolo the street was the same thing as home; this
+cheery _piazzetta_ by the church, so utterly empty sometimes, and
+sometimes so noisy and crowded, was but the wider threshold of their
+home to both the poodle and the child.
+
+So there, under the lofty and stately walls of the old church, Lolo put
+Moufflou through his exercises. They were second nature to Moufflou,
+as to most poodles. He had inherited his address at them from clever
+parents, and, as he had never been frightened or coerced, all his
+lessons and acquirements were but play to him. He acquitted himself
+admirably and the crockery-venders came and looked on, and a sacristan
+came out of the church and smiled, and the barber left his customer’s
+chin all in a lather while he laughed, for the good folk of the
+quarter were all proud of Moufflou and never tired of him, and the
+pleasant, easy-going, good-humored disposition of the Tuscan populace
+is so far removed from the stupid buckram and whalebone in which the
+new-fangled democracy wants to imprison it.
+
+The stranger also was much diverted by Moufflon’s talents, and said,
+half aloud, “How this clever dog would amuse poor Victor! Would you
+bring your poodle to please a sick child I have at home?” he said,
+quite aloud, to Lolo, who smiled and answered that he would. Where was
+the sick child?
+
+“At the Gran Bretagna; not far off,” said the gentleman. “Come this
+afternoon, and ask for me by this name.”
+
+He dropped his card and a couple of francs into Lolo’s hand, and went
+his way. Lolo, with Moufflou scampering after him, dashed into his own
+house, and stumped up the stairs, his crutch making a terrible noise on
+the stone.
+
+“Mother, mother! see what I have got because Moufflou did his tricks,”
+he shouted. “And now you can buy those shoes you want so much, and the
+coffee that you miss so of a morning, and the new linen for Tasso, and
+the shirts for Sandro.”
+
+For to the mind of Lolo two francs was as two millions--source
+unfathomable of riches inexhaustible!
+
+With the afternoon he and Moufflou trotted down the arcades of the
+Uffizi and down the Lung’ Arno to the hotel of the stranger, and,
+showing the stranger’s card, which Lolo could not read, they were
+shown at once into a great chamber, all gilding and fresco and velvet
+furniture.
+
+But Lolo, being a little Florentine, was never troubled by externals,
+or daunted by mere sofas and chairs; he stood and looked around him
+with perfect composure; and Moufflou, whose attitude, when he was not
+romping, was always one of magisterial gravity, sat on his haunches and
+did the same.
+
+Soon the foreigner he had seen in the forenoon entered and spoke to
+him, and led him into another chamber, where stretched on a couch was
+a little wan-faced boy about seven years old; a pretty boy, but so
+pallid, so wasted, so helpless. This poor little boy was heir to a
+great name and a great fortune, but all the science in the world could
+not make him strong enough to run about among the daisies, or able to
+draw a single breath without pain. A feeble smile lit up his face as he
+saw Moufflou and Lolo; then a shadow chased it away.
+
+[Illustration: MOUFFLOU ACQUITTED HIMSELF ABLY AS EVER.]
+
+“Little boy is lame like me,” he said, in a tongue Lolo did not
+understand.
+
+“Yes, but he is a strong little boy, and can move about, as perhaps the
+suns of his country will make you do,” said the gentleman, who was the
+poor little boy’s father. “He has brought you his poodle to amuse you.
+What a handsome dog! is it not?”
+
+“Oh, _bufflins_!” said the poor little fellow, stretching out his
+wasted hands to Moufflou, who submitted his leonine crest to the caress.
+
+Then Lolo went through the performance, and Moufflou acquitted himself
+ably as ever; and the little invalid laughed and shouted with his tiny
+thin voice, and enjoyed it all immensely, and rained cakes and biscuits
+on both the poodle and its master. Lolo crumped the pastries with
+willing white teeth, and Moufflou did no less. Then they got up to go,
+and the sick child on the couch burst into fretful lamentations and
+outcries.
+
+“I want the dog! I will have the dog!” was all he kept repeating.
+
+But Lolo did not know what he said, and was only sorry to see him so
+unhappy.
+
+“You shall have the dog to-morrow,” said the gentleman, to pacify his
+little son; and he hurried Lolo and Moufflou out of the room, and
+consigned them to a servant, having given Lolo five francs this time.
+
+“Why, Moufflou,” said Lolo, with a chuckle of delight, “if we could
+find a foreigner every day, we could eat meat at supper, Moufflou, and
+go to the theatre every evening!”
+
+And he and his crutch clattered home with great eagerness and
+excitement, and Moufflou trotted on his four frilled feet, the blue
+bow with which Bice had tied up his curls on the top of his head,
+fluttering in the wind. But, alas! even his five francs could bring
+no comfort at home. He found his whole family wailing and mourning in
+utterly inconsolable distress.
+
+Tasso had drawn his number that morning, and the number was seven, and
+he must go and be a conscript for three years.
+
+The poor young man stood in the midst of his weeping brothers and
+sisters, with his mother leaning against his shoulder, and down his own
+brown cheeks the tears were falling. He must go, and lose his place
+in the public gardens, and leave his people to starve as they might,
+and be put in a tomfool’s jacket, and drafted off among cursing and
+swearing and strange faces, friendless, homeless, miserable! And the
+mother,--what would become of the mother?
+
+Tasso was the best of lads and the mildest. He was quite happy sweeping
+up the leaves in the long alleys of the Cascine, or mowing the green
+lawns under the ilex avenues, and coming home at supper-time among the
+merry little people and the good woman that he loved. He was quite
+contented; he wanted nothing, only to be let alone; and they would not
+let him alone. They would haul him away to put a heavy musket in his
+hand and a heavy knapsack on his back, and drill him, and curse him,
+and make him into a human target, a live popinjay.
+
+No one had any heed for Lolo and his five francs, and Moufflou,
+understanding that some great sorrow had fallen on his friends, sat
+down and lifted up his voice and howled.
+
+Tasso must go away!--that was all they understood. For three long years
+they must go without the sight of his face, the aid of his strength,
+the pleasure of his smile: Tasso must go! When Lolo understood the
+calamity that had befallen them, he gathered Moufflou up against his
+breast, and sat down, too, on the floor beside him and cried as if he
+would never stop crying.
+
+There was no help for it: it was one of those misfortunes which are,
+as we say in Italian, like a tile tumbled on the head. The tile drops
+from a height, and the poor head bows under the unseen blow. That is
+all.
+
+“What is the use of that?” said the mother, passionately, when Lolo
+showed her his five francs. “It will not buy Tasso’s discharge.”
+
+Lolo felt that his mother was cruel and unjust, and crept to bed with
+Moufflou. Moufflou always slept on Lolo’s feet.
+
+The next morning Lolo got up before sunrise, and he and Moufflou
+accompanied Tasso to his work in the Cascine.
+
+Lolo loved his brother, and clung to every moment whilst they could
+still be together.
+
+“Can nothing keep you, Tasso?” he said, despairingly, as they went down
+the leafy aisles, whilst the Arno water was growing golden as the sun
+rose.
+
+Tasso sighed.
+
+“Nothing, dear. Unless Gesú would send me a thousand francs to buy a
+substitute.”
+
+And he knew he might as well have said, “If one could coin gold ducats
+out of the sunbeams on Arno water.”
+
+Lolo was very sorrowful as he lay on the grass in the meadow where
+Tasso was at work, and the poodle lay stretched beside him.
+
+When Lolo went home to dinner (Tasso took his wrapped in a
+handkerchief) he found his mother very agitated and excited. She was
+laughing one moment, crying the next. She was passionate and peevish,
+tender and jocose by turns; there was something forced and feverish
+about her which the children felt but did not comprehend. She was a
+woman of not very much intelligence, and she had a secret, and she
+carried it ill, and knew not what to do with it; but they could not
+tell that. They only felt a vague sense of disturbance and timidity at
+her unwonted manner.
+
+The meal over (it was only bean-soup, and that is soon eaten), the
+mother said sharply to Lolo, “Your aunt Anita wants you this afternoon.
+She has to go out, and you are needed to stay with the children: be off
+with you.”
+
+Lolo was an obedient child; he took his hat and jumped up as quickly as
+his halting hip would let him. He called Moufflou, who was asleep.
+
+“Leave the dog,” said his mother, sharply. “’Nita will not have him
+messing and carrying mud about her nice clean rooms. She told me so.
+Leave him, I say.”
+
+“Leave Moufflou!” echoed Lolo, for never in all Moufflou’s life
+had Lolo parted from him. Leave Moufflou! He stared open-eyed and
+open-mouthed at his mother. What could have come to her?
+
+“Leave him, I say,” she repeated, more sharply than ever. “Must I speak
+twice to my own children? Be off with you, and leave the dog, I say.”
+
+And she clutched Moufflou by his long silky mane and dragged him
+backwards, whilst with the other hand she thrust out of the door Lolo
+and Bice.
+
+Lolo began to hammer with his crutch at the door thus closed on him;
+but Bice coaxed and entreated him.
+
+“Poor mother has been so worried about Tasso,” she pleaded. “And what
+harm can come to Moufflou? And I do think he was tired, Lolo; the
+Cascine is a long way; and it is quite true that Aunt ’Nita never liked
+him.”
+
+So by one means and another she coaxed her brother away; and they went
+almost in silence to where their aunt Anita dwelt, which was across the
+river, near the dark-red bell-shaped dome of Santa Spirito.
+
+It was true that her aunt had wanted them to mind her room and her
+babies whilst she was away carrying home some lace to a villa outside
+the Roman gate, for she was a lace-washer and clear-starcher by trade.
+There they had to stay in the little dark room with the two babies,
+with nothing to amuse the time except the clang of the bells of the
+church of the Holy Spirit, and the voices of the lemonade-sellers
+shouting in the street below. Aunt Anita did not get back till it was
+more than dusk, and the two children trotted homeward hand in hand,
+Lolo’s leg dragging itself painfully along, for without Moufflou’s
+white figure dancing on before him he felt very tired indeed. It was
+pitch dark when they got to Or San Michele, and the lamps burned dully.
+
+Lolo stumped up the stairs wearily, with a vague, dull fear at his
+small heart.
+
+“Moufflou, Moufflou!” he called. Where was Moufflou? Always at
+the first sound of his crutch the poodle came flying towards him.
+“Moufflou, Moufflou!” he called all the way up the long, dark twisting
+stone stair. He pushed open the door, and he called again, “Moufflou,
+Moufflou!”
+
+But no dog answered to his call.
+
+“Mother, where is Moufflou?” he asked, staring with blinking, dazzled
+eyes into the oil-lit room where his mother sat knitting. Tasso was not
+then home from work. His mother went on with her knitting; there was
+an uneasy look on her face.
+
+“Mother, what have you done with Moufflou, _my_ Moufflou?” said
+Lolo, with a look that was almost stern on his ten-year-old face.
+
+Then his mother, without looking up and moving her knitting-needles
+very rapidly, said,--
+
+“Moufflou is sold!”
+
+And little Dina, who was a quick, pert child, cried, with a shrill
+voice,--
+
+“Mother has sold him for a thousand francs to the foreign gentleman.”
+
+“Sold him!”
+
+Lolo grew white and grew cold as ice; he stammered, threw up his hands
+over his head, gasped a little for breath, then fell down in a dead
+swoon, his poor useless limb doubled under him.
+
+When Tasso came home that sad night and found his little brother
+shivering, moaning, and half delirious, and when he heard what had been
+done, he was sorely grieved.
+
+“Oh, mother, how could you do it?” he cried. “Poor, poor Moufflou! and
+Lolo loves him so!”
+
+“I have got the money,” said his mother, feverishly, “and you will
+not need to go for a soldier: we can buy your substitute. What is a
+poodle, that you mourn about it? We can get another poodle for Lolo.”
+
+“Another will not be Moufflou,” said Tasso, and yet was seized with
+such a frantic happiness himself at the knowledge that he would not
+need go to the army, that he, too, felt as if he were drunk on new
+wine, and had not the heart to rebuke his mother.
+
+“A thousand francs!” he muttered; “a thousand francs! _Dio mio!_
+Who could ever have fancied anybody would have given such a price for
+a common white poodle? One would think the gentleman had bought the
+church and the tabernacle!”
+
+“Fools and their money are soon parted,” said his mother, with cross
+contempt.
+
+It was true: she had sold Moufflou.
+
+The English gentleman had called on her while Lolo and the dog had been
+in the Cascine, and had said that he was desirous of buying the poodle,
+which had so diverted his sick child that the little invalid would not
+be comforted unless he possessed it. Now, at any other time the good
+woman would have sturdily refused any idea of selling Moufflou; but
+that morning the thousand francs which would buy Tasso’s substitute
+were forever in her mind and before her eyes. When she heard the
+foreigner her heart gave a great leap, and her head swam giddily, and
+she thought, in a spasm of longing--if she could get those thousand
+francs! But though she was so dizzy and so upset she retained her grip
+on her native Florentine shrewdness. She said nothing of her need of
+the money; not a syllable of her sore distress. On the contrary, she
+was coy and wary, affected great reluctance to part with her pet,
+invented a great offer made for him by a director of a circus, and
+finally let fall a hint that less than a thousand francs she could
+never take for poor Moufflou.
+
+The gentleman assented with so much willingness to the price that she
+instantly regretted not having asked double. He told her that if she
+would take the poodle that afternoon to his hotel the money should be
+paid to her; so she despatched her children after their noonday meal in
+various directions, and herself took Moufflou to his doom. She could
+not believe her senses when ten hundred-franc notes were put into
+her hand. She scrawled her signature, Rosina Calabucci, to a formal
+receipt, and went away, leaving Moufflou in his new owner’s rooms, and
+hearing his howls and moans pursue her all the way down the staircase
+and out into the air.
+
+She was not easy at what she had done.
+
+“It seemed,” she said to herself, “like selling a Christian.”
+
+But then to keep her eldest son at home--what a joy that was! On the
+whole, she cried so and laughed so as she went down the Lung’ Arno that
+once or twice people looked at her, thinking her out of her senses, and
+a guard spoke to her angrily.
+
+Meanwhile, Lolo was sick and delirious with grief. Twenty times he got
+out of his bed and screamed to be allowed to go with Moufflou, and
+twenty times his mother and his brothers put him back again and held
+him down and tried in vain to quiet him.
+
+The child was beside himself with misery. “Moufflou! Moufflou!” he
+sobbed at every moment; and by night he was in a raging fever, and when
+his mother, frightened, ran in and called in the doctor of the quarter,
+that worthy shook his head and said something as to a shock of the
+nervous system, and muttered a long word--“meningitis.”
+
+Lolo took a hatred to the sight of Tasso, and thrust him away, and his
+mother, too.
+
+“It is for you Moufflou is sold,” he said, with his little teeth and
+hands tight clinched.
+
+After a day or two Tasso felt as if he could not bear his life, and
+went down to the hotel to see if the foreign gentleman would allow him
+to have Moufflou back for half an hour to quiet his little brother
+by a sight of him. But at the hotel he was told that the _Milord
+Inglese_ who had bought the dog of Rosina Calabucci had gone that
+same night of the purchase to Rome, to Naples, to Palermo, _chi
+sa_?
+
+“And Moufflou with him?” asked Tasso.
+
+“The _barbone_ he had bought went with him,” said the porter of
+the hotel. “Such a beast! Howling, shrieking, raging all the day, and
+all the paint scratched off the _salon_ door.”
+
+Poor Moufflou! Tasso’s heart was heavy as he heard of that sad helpless
+misery of their bartered favorite and friend.
+
+“What matter?” said his mother, fiercely, when he told her. “A dog is
+a dog. They will feed him better than we could. In a week he will have
+forgotten--_chè_!”
+
+But Tasso feared that Moufflou would not forget. Lolo certainly would
+not. The doctor came to the bedside twice a day, and ice and water were
+kept on the aching hot little head that had got the malady with the
+long name, and for the chief part of the time Lolo lay quiet, dull,
+and stupid, breathing heavily, and then at intervals cried and sobbed
+and shrieked hysterically for Moufflou.
+
+“Can you not get what he calls for to quiet him with a sight of it?”
+said the doctor. But that was not possible, and poor Rosina covered her
+head with her apron and felt a guilty creature.
+
+“Still, you will not go to the army,” she said to Tasso, clinging to
+that immense joy for her consolation. “Only think! we can pay Guido
+Squarcione to go for you. He always said he would go if anybody would
+pay him. Oh, my Tasso, surely to keep you is worth a dog’s life!”
+
+“And Lolo’s?” said Tasso, gloomily. “Nay, mother, it works ill to
+meddle too much with fate. I drew my number; I was bound to go. Heaven
+would have made it up to you somehow.”
+
+“Heaven sent me the foreigner; the Madonna’s own self sent him to ease
+a mother’s pain,” said Rosina, rapidly and angrily. “There are the
+thousand francs safe to hand in the _cassone_, and what, pray, is
+it we miss? Only a dog like a sheep, that brought gallons of mud in
+with him every time it rained, and ate as much as any one of you.”
+
+“But Lolo?” said Tasso, under his breath.
+
+His mother was so irritated and so tormented by her own conscience
+that she upset all the cabbage broth into the burning charcoal.
+
+“Lolo was always a little fool, thinking of nothing but the church and
+the dog and nasty field-flowers,” she said, angrily. “I humored him
+ever too much because of the hurt to his hip, and so--and so----”
+
+Then the poor soul made matters worse by dropping her tears into the
+saucepan, and fanning the charcoal so furiously that the flame caught
+her fan of cane-leaves, and would have burned her arm had not Tasso
+been there.
+
+“You are my prop and safety always. Who would not have done what I did?
+Not Santa Felicita herself,” she said, with a great sob.
+
+But all this did not cure poor Lolo.
+
+The days and the weeks of the golden autumn weather passed away, and
+he was always in danger, and the small close room where he slept with
+Sandro and Beppo and Tasso was not one to cure such an illness as had
+now beset him. Tasso went to his work with a sick heart in the Cascine,
+where the colchicum was all lilac among the meadow grass, and the ashes
+and elms were taking their first flush of the coming autumnal change.
+He did not think Lolo would ever get well, and the good lad felt as if
+he had been the murderer of his little brother.
+
+True, he had had no hand or voice in the sale of Moufflou, but Moufflou
+had been sold for his sake. It made him feel half guilty, very unhappy,
+quite unworthy of all the sacrifice that had been made for him. “Nobody
+should meddle with fate,” thought Tasso, who knew his grandfather
+had died in San Bonifazio because he had driven himself mad over the
+dream-book trying to get lucky numbers for the lottery and become a
+rich man at a stroke.
+
+It was rapture, indeed, to know that he was free of the army for a
+time at least, that he might go on undisturbed at his healthful labor,
+and get a raise in wages as time went on, and dwell in peace with
+his family, and perhaps--perhaps in time earn enough to marry pretty
+flaxen-haired Biondina, the daughter of the barber in the piazzetta. It
+was rapture indeed; but then poor Moufflou!--and poor, poor Lolo! Tasso
+felt as if he had bought his own exemption by seeing his little brother
+and the good dog torn in pieces and buried alive for his service.
+
+And where was poor Moufflou?
+
+Gone far away somewhere south in the hurrying, screeching, vomiting,
+braying train that it made Tasso giddy only to look at as it rushed by
+the green meadows beyond the Cascine on its way to the sea.
+
+“If he could see the dog he cries so for, it might save him,” said the
+doctor, who stood with a grave face watching Lolo.
+
+But that was beyond any one’s power. No one could tell where Moufflou
+was. He might be carried away to England, to France, to Russia, to
+America--who could say? They did not know where his purchaser had gone.
+Moufflou even might be dead.
+
+The poor mother, when the doctor said that, went and looked at the ten
+hundred-franc notes that were once like angels’ faces to her, and said
+to them,--
+
+“Oh, you children of Satan, why did you tempt me? I sold the poor,
+innocent, trustful beast to get you, and now my child is dying!”
+
+Her eldest son would stay at home, indeed; but if this little lame one
+died! Rosina Calabucci would have given up the notes and consented
+never to own five francs in her life if only she could have gone back
+over the time and kept Moufflou, and seen his little master running out
+with him into the sunshine.
+
+More than a month went by, and Lolo lay in the same state, his
+yellow hair shorn, his eyes dilated and yet stupid, life kept in
+him by a spoonful of milk, a lump of ice, a drink of lemon-water;
+always muttering, when he spoke at all. “Moufflou, Moufflou, _dov’
+è_ Moufflou?” and lying for days together in somnolence and
+unconsciousness, with the fire eating at his brain and the weight lying
+on it like a stone.
+
+The neighbors were kind, and brought fruit and the like, and sat up
+with him, and chattered so all at once in one continuous brawl that
+they were enough in themselves to kill him, for such is ever the
+Italian fashion of sympathy in all illness.
+
+But Lolo did not get well, did not even seem to see the light at all,
+or to distinguish any sounds around him; and the doctor in plain words
+told Rosina Calabucci that her little boy must die. Die, and the church
+so near? She could not believe it. Could St. Mark, and St. George, and
+the rest that he had loved so do nothing for him? No, said the doctor,
+they could do nothing; the dog might do something, since the brain had
+so fastened on that one idea; but then they had sold the dog.
+
+“Yes; I sold him!” said the poor mother, breaking into floods of
+remorseful tears.
+
+So at last the end drew so nigh that one twilight time the priest
+came out of the great arched door that is next St. Mark, with the
+Host uplifted, and a little acolyte ringing the bell before it, and
+passed across the piazzetta, and went up the dark staircase of Rosina’s
+dwelling, and passed through the weeping, terrified children, and went
+to the bedside of Lolo.
+
+Lolo was unconscious, but the holy man touched his little body and
+limbs with the sacred oil, and prayed over him, and then stood
+sorrowful with bowed head.
+
+Lolo had had his first communion in the summer, and in his preparation
+for it had shown an intelligence and devoutness that had won the
+priest’s gentle heart.
+
+Standing there, the holy man commended the innocent soul to God. It
+was the last service to be rendered to him save that very last of all
+when the funeral office should be read above his little grave among the
+millions of nameless dead at the sepulchres of the poor at Trebbiano.
+
+All was still as the priest’s voice ceased; only the sobs of the mother
+and of the children broke the stillness as they kneeled; the hand of
+Biondina had stolen into Tasso’s.
+
+Suddenly, there was a loud scuffling noise; hurrying feet came patter,
+patter, patter up the stairs; a ball of mud and dust flew over the
+heads of the kneeling figures, fleet as the wind Moufflou dashed
+through the room and leaped upon the bed.
+
+Lolo opened his heavy eyes, and a sudden light of consciousness gleamed
+in them like a sunbeam. “Moufflou!” he murmured, in his little thin
+faint voice. The dog pressed close to his breast and kissed his wasted
+face.
+
+Moufflou was come home!
+
+And Lolo came home too, for death let go its hold upon him. Little
+by little, very faintly and flickeringly and very uncertainly at
+the first, life returned to the poor little body, and reason to the
+tormented, heated little brain. Moufflou was his physician; Moufflou,
+who, himself a skeleton under his matted curls, would not stir from his
+side and looked at him all day long with two beaming brown eyes full of
+unutterable love.
+
+Lolo was happy; he asked no questions,--was too weak, indeed, even to
+wonder. He had Moufflou--that was enough.
+
+Alas! though they dared not say so in his hearing, it was not enough
+for his elders. His mother and Tasso knew that the poodle had been
+sold and paid for; that they could lay no claim to keep him; and that
+almost certainly his purchaser would seek him out and assert his
+indisputable right to him. And then how would Lolo ever bear that
+second parting?--Lolo, so weak that he weighed no more than if he had
+been a little bird.
+
+Moufflou had, no doubt, travelled a long distance and suffered much. He
+was but skin and bone; he bore the marks of blows and kicks; his once
+silken hair was all discolored and matted; he had, no doubt, travelled
+far. But then his purchaser would be sure to ask for him, soon or late,
+at his old home; and then? Well, then if they did not give him up
+themselves, the law would make them.
+
+Rosina Calabucci and Tasso, though they dared say nothing before any of
+the children, felt their hearts in their mouths at every step on the
+stair, and the first interrogation of Tasso every evening when he came
+from his work was, “Has any one come for Moufflou?” For ten days no one
+came, and their first terrors lulled a little.
+
+On the eleventh morning, a feast-day, on which Tasso was not going to
+his labors in the Cascine, there came a person, with a foreign look,
+who said the words they so much dreaded to hear: “Has the poodle that
+you sold to an English gentleman come back to you?”
+
+Yes: his English master claimed him!
+
+The servant said that they had missed the dog in Rome a few days after
+buying him and taking him there; that he had been searched for in
+vain, and that his master had thought it possible the animal might have
+found his way back to his old home: there had been stories of such
+wonderful sagacity in dogs: anyhow, he had sent for him on the chance;
+he was himself back on the Lung’ Arno. The servant pulled from his
+pocket a chain, and said his orders were to take the poodle away at
+once: the little sick gentleman had fretted very much about his loss.
+
+Tasso heard in a very agony of despair. To take Moufflou away now would
+be to kill Lolo,--Lolo so feeble still, so unable to understand, so
+passionately alive to every sight and sound of Moufflou, lying for
+hours together motionless with his hand buried in the poodle’s curls,
+saying nothing, only smiling now and then, and murmuring a word or two
+in Moufflou’s ear.
+
+“The dog did come home,” said Tasso, at length, in a low voice; “angels
+must have shown him the road, poor beast! From Rome! Only to think of
+it, from Rome! And he a dumb thing! I tell you he is here, honestly: so
+will you not trust me just so far as this? Will you let me go with you
+and speak to the English lord before you take the dog away? I have a
+little brother sorely ill----”
+
+He could not speak more, for tears that choked his voice.
+
+At last the messenger agreed so far as this. Tasso might go first and
+see the master, but he would stay here and have a care they did not
+spirit the dog away,--“for a thousand francs were paid for him,” added
+the man, “and a dog that can come all the way from Rome by itself must
+be an uncanny creature.”
+
+Tasso thanked him, went up-stairs, was thankful that his mother was at
+mass and could not dispute with him, took the ten hundred-franc notes
+from the old oak _cassone_, and with them in his breast-pocket
+walked out into the air. He was but a poor working lad, but he had made
+up his mind to do an heroic deed, for self-sacrifice is always heroic.
+He went straightway to the hotel where the English _milord_
+was, and when he had got there remembered that still he did not know
+the name of Moufflou’s owner; but the people of the hotel knew him
+as Rosina Calabucci’s son, and guessed what he wanted, and said the
+gentleman who had lost the poodle was within up-stairs and they would
+tell him.
+
+Tasso waited some half-hour with his heart beating sorely against the
+packet of hundred-franc notes. At last he was beckoned up-stairs, and
+there he saw a foreigner with a mild fair face, and a very lovely lady
+and a delicate child who was lying on a couch. “Moufflou! Where is
+Moufflou?” cried the little child, impatiently, as he saw the youth
+enter.
+
+Tasso took his hat off, and stood in the doorway an embrowned, healthy,
+not ungraceful figure, in his working-clothes of rough blue stuff.
+
+“If you please, most illustrious,” he stammered, “poor Moufflou has
+come home.”
+
+The child gave a cry of delight; the gentleman and lady one of wonder.
+Come home! All the way from Rome!
+
+“Yes, he has, most illustrious,” said Tasso, gaining courage and
+eloquence; “and now I want to beg something of you. We are poor, and
+I drew a bad number, and it was for that my mother sold Moufflou. For
+myself, I did not know anything of it; but she thought she would buy
+my substitute, and of course she could; but Moufflou is come home, and
+my little brother Lolo, the little boy your most illustrious first saw
+playing with the poodle, fell ill of the grief of losing Moufflou, and
+for a month has lain saying nothing sensible, but only calling for
+the dog, and my old grandfather died of worrying himself mad over the
+lottery numbers, and Lolo was so near dying that the Blessed Host had
+been brought, and the holy oil had been put on him, when all at once
+there rushes in Moufflou, skin and bone, and covered with mud, and at
+the sight of him Lolo comes back to his senses, and that is now ten
+days ago, and though Lolo is still as weak as a new-born thing, he is
+always sensible, and takes what we give him to eat, and lies always
+looking at Moufflou, and smiling, and saying, ‘Moufflou! Moufflou!’
+and, most illustrious, I know well you have bought the dog, and the law
+is with you, and by the law you claim it; but I thought perhaps, as
+Lolo loves him so, you would let us keep the dog, and would take back
+the thousand francs, and myself I will go and be a soldier, and heaven
+will take care of them all somehow.”
+
+Then Tasso, having said all this in one breathless, monotonous
+recitative, took the thousand francs out of his breast-pocket and held
+them out timidly towards the foreign gentleman, who motioned them aside
+and stood silent.
+
+“Did you understand, Victor,” he said, at last, to his little son.
+
+The child hid his face in his cushions.
+
+“Yes, I did understand something: let Lolo keep him; Moufflou was not
+happy with me.”
+
+But he burst out crying as he said it.
+
+Moufflou had run away from him.
+
+Moufflou had never loved him, for all his sweet cakes and fond
+caresses and platefuls of delicate savory meats. Moufflou had run away
+and found his own road over two hundred miles and more to go back to
+some little hungry children, who never had enough to eat themselves,
+and so, certainly, could never give enough to eat to the dog. Poor
+little boy! He was so rich and so pampered and so powerful, and yet he
+could never make Moufflou love him!
+
+Tasso, who understood nothing that was said, laid the ten hundred-franc
+notes down on a table near him.
+
+“If you would take them, most illustrious, and give me back what my
+mother wrote when she sold Moufflou,” he said, timidly, “I would pray
+for you night and day, and Lolo would too; and as for the dog, we will
+get a puppy and train him for your little _signorino_; they can
+all do tricks, more or less, it comes by nature; and as for me, I will
+go to the army willingly; it is not right to interfere with fate; my
+old grandfather died mad because he would try to be a rich man, by
+dreaming about it and pulling destiny by the ears, as if she were a
+kicking mule; only, I do pray of you, do not take away Moufflou. And
+to think he trotted all those miles and miles, and you carried him by
+train, too, and he never could have seen the road, and he has no power
+of speech to ask----”
+
+Tasso broke down again in his eloquence, and drew the back of his hand
+across his wet eyelashes.
+
+The English gentleman was not altogether unmoved.
+
+“Poor faithful dog!” he said, with a sigh. “I am afraid we were very
+cruel to him, meaning to be kind. No; we will not claim him, and I do
+not think you should go for a soldier; you seem so good a lad, and your
+mother must need you. Keep the money, my boy, and in payment you shall
+train up the puppy you talk of, and bring him to my little boy. I will
+come and see your mother and Lolo to-morrow. All the way from Rome!
+What wonderful sagacity! what matchless fidelity!”
+
+You can imagine, without any telling of mine, the joy that reigned in
+Moufflou’s home when Tasso returned thither with the money and the good
+tidings both. His substitute was bought without a day’s delay, and
+Lolo rapidly recovered. As for Moufflou, he could never tell them his
+troubles, his wanderings, his difficulties, his perils; he could never
+tell them by what miraculous knowledge he had found his way across
+Italy, from the gates of Rome to the gates of Florence. But he soon
+grew plump again, and merry, and his love for Lolo was yet greater than
+before.
+
+By the winter all the family went to live on an estate near Spezia that
+the English gentleman had purchased, and there Moufflou was happier
+than ever. The little English boy is gaining strength in the soft air,
+and he and Lolo are great friends, and play with Moufflou and the
+poodle puppy half the day upon the sunny terraces and under the green
+orange boughs. Tasso is one of the gardeners there; he will have to
+serve as a soldier probably in some category or another, but he is safe
+for the time, and is happy. Lolo, whose lameness will always exempt him
+from military service, when he grows to be a man means to be a florist,
+and a great one. He has learned to read, as the first step on the road
+of his ambition.
+
+“But oh, Moufflou, how _did_ you find your way home?” he asks the
+dog a hundred times a week.
+
+How indeed!
+
+No one ever knew how Moufflou had made that long journey on foot, so
+many weary miles; but beyond a doubt he had done it alone and unaided,
+for if any one had helped him they would have come home with him to
+claim the reward.
+
+And that you may not wonder too greatly at Moufflou’s miraculous
+journey on his four bare feet, I will add here two facts known to
+friends of mine, of whose truthfulness there can be no doubt.
+
+One concerns a French poodle who was purchased in Paris by the friend
+of my friend, and brought all the way from Paris to Milan by train.
+In a few days after his arrival in Milan the poodle was missing; and
+nothing more was heard or known of him until many weeks later his
+quondam owner in Paris, on opening his door one morning, found the dog
+stretched dying on the threshold of his old home.
+
+That is one fact; not a story, mind you, _a fact_.
+
+The other is related to me by an Italian nobleman, who in his youth
+belonged to the Guardia Nobile of Tuscany. That brilliant corps of
+elegant gentlemen owned a regimental pet, a poodle also, a fine merry
+and handsome dog of its kind; and the officers all loved and made
+much of him, except, alas! the commandant of the regiment, who hated
+him, because when the officers were on parade or riding in escort the
+poodle was sure to be jumping and frisking about in front of them. It
+is difficult to see where the harm of this was, but this odious old
+martinet vowed vengeance against the dog, and, being of course all
+powerful in his own corps, ordered the exile from Florence of the poor
+fellow. He was sent to a farm at Prato, twenty miles off, along the
+hills; but very soon he found his way back to Florence. He was then
+sent to Leghorn, forty miles off, but in a week’s time had returned to
+his old comrades. He was then, by order of his unrelenting foe, shipped
+to the island of Sardinia. How he did it no one ever could tell, for he
+was carried safely to Sardinia and placed inland there in kind custody,
+but in some wonderful way the poor dog must have found out the sea
+and hidden himself on board a returning vessel, for in a month’s time
+from his exile to the island he was back again among his comrades in
+Florence. Now, what I have to tell you almost breaks my heart to say,
+and will, I think, quite break yours to hear: alas! the brute of a
+commandant, untouched by such marvellous cleverness and faithfulness,
+was his enemy to the bitter end, and, in inexorable hatred, _had him
+shot_! Oh, when you grow to manhood and have power, use it with
+tenderness!
+
+
+
+
+                               LAMPBLACK
+
+
+
+
+                               LAMPBLACK
+
+
+A POOR black paint lay very unhappy in its tube one day alone, having
+tumbled out of an artist’s color-box and lying quite unnoticed for a
+year. “I am only Lampblack,” he said to himself. “The master never
+looks at me: he says I am heavy, dull, lustreless, useless. I wish I
+could cake and dry up and die, as poor Flakewhite did when he thought
+she turned yellow and deserted her.”
+
+But Lampblack could not die; he could only lie in his tin tube and
+pine, like a silly, sorrowful thing as he was, in company with some
+broken bits of charcoal and a rusty palette-knife. The master never
+touched him; month after month passed by, and he was never thought
+of; the other paints had all their turn of fair fortune, and went out
+into the world to great academies and mighty palaces, transfigured and
+rejoicing in a thousand beautiful shapes and services. But Lampblack
+was always passed over as dull and coarse, which indeed he was, and
+knew himself to be so, poor fellow, which made it all the worse. “You
+are only a deposit!” said the other colors to him; and he felt that it
+was disgraceful to be a deposit, though he was not quite sure what it
+meant.
+
+“If only I were happy like the others!” thought poor, sooty Lampblack,
+sorrowful in his corner. “There is Bistre, now, he is not so very much
+better-looking than I am, and yet they can do nothing without him,
+whether it is a girl’s face or a wimple in a river!”
+
+The others were all so happy in this beautiful, bright studio, whose
+open casements were hung with myrtle and passion-flower, and whose
+silence was filled with the singing of nightingales. Cobalt, with a
+touch or two, became the loveliness of summer skies at morning; the
+Lakes and Carmines bloomed in a thousand exquisite flowers and fancies;
+the Chromes and Ochres (mere dull earths) were allowed to spread
+themselves in sheets of gold that took the shine of the sun into the
+darkest places; Umber, a sombre and gloomy thing, could lurk yet in a
+child’s curls and laugh in a child’s smiles; whilst all the families of
+the Vermilions, the Blues, the Greens, lived in a perpetual glory of
+sunset or sunrise, of ocean waves or autumn woods, of kingly pageant or
+of martial pomp.
+
+It was very hard. Poor Lampblack felt as if his very heart would
+break, above all when he thought of pretty little Rose Madder, whom he
+loved dearly, and who never would even look at him, because she was
+so very proud, being herself always placed in nothing less than rosy
+clouds, or the hearts of roses, or something as fair and spiritual.
+
+“I am only a wretched deposit!” sighed Lampblack, and the rusty
+palette-knife grumbled back, “My own life has been ruined in cleaning
+dirty brushes, and see what the gratitude of men and brushes is!”
+
+“But at least you have been of use once; but I never am--never!” said
+Lampblack, wearily; and indeed he had been there so long that the
+spiders had spun their silver fleeces all about him, and he was growing
+as gray as an old bottle does in a dark cellar.
+
+At that moment the door of the studio opened, and there came a flood of
+light, and the step of a man was heard: the hearts of all the colors
+jumped for joy, because the step was that of their magician, who out
+of mere common clays and ground ores could raise them at a touch into
+splendors of the gods and divinities immortal.
+
+Only the heart of poor dusty Lampblack could not beat a throb the more,
+because he was always left alone and never was thought worthy even
+of a glance. He could not believe his senses when this afternoon--oh,
+miracle and ecstasy!--the step of the master crossed the floor to the
+obscured corner where he lay under his spiders’ webs, and the hand of
+the master touched him. Lampblack felt sick and faint with rapture. Had
+recognition come at last?
+
+The master took him up: “You will do for this work,” he said; and
+Lampblack was borne trembling to an easel. The colors, for once in
+their turn neglected, crowded together to watch, looking in their
+bright tin tubes like rows of little soldiers in armor.
+
+“It is the old dull Deposit,” they murmured to one another, and felt
+contemptuous, yet were curious, as scornful people often will be.
+
+“But I am going to be glorious and great,” thought Lampblack, and his
+heart swelled high; for never more would they be able to hurl the name
+of Deposit at him, a name which hurt him none the less, but all the
+more indeed, because it was unintelligible.
+
+“You will do for this work,” said the master, and let Lampblack out of
+his metal prison-house into the light and touched him with the brush
+that was the wand of magic.
+
+[Illustration: “OLD DEPOSIT IS GOING TO BE A SIGN-POST,” THEY CRIED]
+
+“What am I going to be?” wondered Lampblack, as he felt himself taken
+on to a large piece of deal board, so large that he felt he must be
+going to make the outline of an athlete or the shadows of a tempest at
+the least.
+
+Himself he could not tell what he was becoming: he was happy enough and
+grand enough only to be employed, and, as he was being used, began to
+dream a thousand things of all the scenes he would be in, and all the
+hues that he would wear, and all the praise that he would hear when he
+went out into that wonderful great world of which his master was an
+idol. From his secret dreams he was harshly roused; all the colors were
+laughing and tittering round him till the little tin helmets they wore
+shook with their merriment.
+
+“Old Deposit is going to be a sign-post,” they cried to one another so
+merrily that the spiders, who are not companionable creatures, felt
+themselves compelled to come to the doors of their dens and chuckle,
+too. A sign-post! Lampblack, stretched out in an ecstasy upon the
+board, roused himself shivering from his dreams, and gazed at his own
+metamorphosis. He had been made into seven letters, thus:
+
+  BANDITA.
+
+This word in the Italian country, where the English painter’s studio
+was, means, Do not trespass, do not shoot, do not show yourself here:
+anything, indeed, that is peremptory and uncivil to all trespassers. In
+these seven letters, outspread upon the board, was Lampblack crucified!
+
+Farewell, ambitious hopes and happy dreams! He had been employed to
+paint a sign-board, a thing stoned by the boys, blown on by the winds,
+gnawed by the rats, and drenched with the winter’s rains. Better the
+dust and the cobwebs of his old corner than such a shame as this!
+
+But help was there none. His fate was fixed. He was dried with a
+drench of turpentine, hastily clothed in a coat of copal, and, ere he
+yet was fully aware of all his misery, was being borne away upon the
+great board out of doors and handed to the gardener. For the master
+was a hasty and ardent man, and had been stung into impatience by
+the slaughter of some favorite blue thrushes in his ilex-trees that
+day, and so in his haste had chosen to do journeyman’s work himself.
+Lampblack was carried out of the studio for the last time, and as the
+door closed on him he heard all the colors laughing, and the laugh of
+little Rose Madder was highest of all as she cried to Naples Yellow,
+who was a dandy and made court to her, “Poor old ugly Deposit! He will
+grumble to the owls and the bats now!”
+
+The door shut, shutting him out forever from all that joyous company
+and palace of fair visions, and the rough hands of the gardener grasped
+him and carried him to the edge of the great garden, where the wall
+overlooked the public road, and there fastened him up on high with a
+band of iron round the trunk of a tree.
+
+That night it rained heavily, and the north wind blew, and there was
+thunder also. Lampblack, out in the storm without his tin house to
+shelter him, felt that of all creatures wretched on the face of the
+earth there was not one so miserable as he.
+
+A sign-board! Nothing but a sign-board!
+
+The degradation of a color, created for art and artists, could not be
+deeper or more grievous anywhere. Oh, how he sighed for his tin tube
+and the quiet nook with the charcoal and the palette-knife!
+
+He had been unhappy there indeed, but still had had always some sort of
+hope to solace him,--some chance still remaining that one day fortune
+might smile and he be allowed to be at least the lowest stratum of some
+immortal work.
+
+But now hope was there none. His doom, his end, were fixed and
+changeless. Nevermore could he be anything but what he was; and change
+there could be none till weather and time should have done their work
+on him, and he be rotting on the wet earth, a shattered and worm-eaten
+wreck.
+
+Day broke,--a gloomy, misty morning.
+
+From where he was crucified upon the tree-trunk he could no longer even
+see his beloved home, the studio: he could only see a dusky, intricate
+tangle of branches all about him, and below the wall of flint, with the
+Banksia that grew on it, and the hard, muddy highway, drenched from the
+storm of the night.
+
+A man passed in a miller’s cart, and stood up and swore at him, because
+the people had liked to come and shoot and trap the birds of the
+master’s wooded gardens, and knew that they must not do it now.
+
+A slug crawled over him, and a snail also. A woodpecker hammered at him
+with its strong beak. A boy went by under the wall and threw stones
+at him, and called him names. The rain poured down again heavily. He
+thought of the happy painting-room, where it had seemed always summer
+and always sunshine, and where now in the forenoon all the colors
+were marshalling in the pageantry of the Arts, as he had seen them do
+hundreds of times from his lone corner. All the misery of the past
+looked happiness now.
+
+“If I were only dead, like Flakewhite,” he thought; but the stones only
+bruised, they did not kill him: and the iron band only hurt, it did not
+stifle him. For whatever suffers very much, has always so much strength
+to continue to exist. And almost his loyal heart blasphemed and cursed
+the master who had brought him to such a fate as this.
+
+The day grew apace, and noon went by, and with it the rain passed. The
+sun shone out once more, and Lampblack, even imprisoned and wretched as
+he was, could not but see how beautiful the wet leaves looked, and the
+gossamers all hung with rain-drops, and the blue sky that shone through
+the boughs; for he had not lived with a great artist all his days to be
+blind, even in pain, to the loveliness of nature. The sun came out, and
+with it some little brown birds tripped out too,--very simple and plain
+in their costumes and ways, but which Lampblack knew were the loves
+of the poets, for he had heard the master call them so many times in
+summer nights. The little brown birds came tripping and pecking about
+on the grass underneath his tree-trunk, and then flew on the top of the
+wall, which was covered with Banksia and many other creepers. The brown
+birds sang a little song, for though they sing most in the moonlight
+they do sing by day, too, and sometimes all day long. And what they
+sung was this:
+
+“Oh, how happy we are, how happy! No nets dare now be spread for us, no
+cruel boys dare climb, and no cruel shooters fire. We are safe, quite
+safe, and the sweet summer has begun!”
+
+Lampblack listened, and even in his misery was touched and soothed by
+the tender liquid sounds that these little throats poured out among the
+light-yellow bloom of the Banksia flowers. And when one of the brown
+birds came and sat on a branch by him, swaying itself and drinking the
+rain-drops off a leaf, he ventured to ask, as well as he could for the
+iron that strangled him, why they were so safe, and what made them so
+happy.
+
+The bird looked at him in surprise.
+
+“Do you not know?” he said. “It is _you_!”
+
+“I!” echoed Lampblack, and could say no more, for he feared that the
+bird was mocking him, a poor, silly, rusty black paint, only spread out
+to rot in fair weather and foul. What good could he do to any creature?
+
+[Illustration: “THEN THE MASTER KNEW BEST,” THOUGHT LAMPBLACK.]
+
+“You,” repeated the nightingale. “Did you not see that man under the
+wall? He had a gun; we should have been dead but for you. We will come
+and sing to you all night long, since you like it; and when we go to
+bed at dawn, I will tell my cousins the thrushes and merles to take our
+places, so that you shall hear somebody singing near you all the day
+long.”
+
+Lampblack was silent.
+
+His heart was too full to speak.
+
+Was it possible that he was of use, after all?
+
+“Can it be true?” he said, timidly.
+
+“Quite true,” said the nightingale.
+
+“Then the master knew best,” thought Lampblack.
+
+Never would he adorn a palace or be adored upon an altar. His high
+hopes were all dead, like last year’s leaves. The colors in the studio
+had all the glories of the world, but he was of use in it, after all;
+he could save these little lives. He was poor and despised, bruised by
+stones and drenched by storms; yet was he content, nailed there upon
+his tree, for he had not been made quite in vain.
+
+The sunset poured its red and golden splendors through the darkness
+of the boughs, and the birds sang all together, shouting for joy and
+praising God.
+
+
+
+
+                        THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE
+
+
+
+
+                        THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE
+
+
+SHE was a Quatre Saison Rose-tree.
+
+She lived in a beautiful old garden with some charming magnolias for
+neighbors: they rather overshadowed her, certainly, because they were
+so very great and grand; but then such shadow as that is preferable,
+as every one knows, to a mere vulgar enjoyment of common daylight, and
+then the beetles went most to the magnolia-blossoms, for being so great
+and grand of course they got very much preyed upon, and this was a vast
+gain for the rose that was near them. She herself leaned against the
+wall of an orange-house, in company with a Banksia, a buoyant, active,
+simple-minded thing, for whom Rosa Damascena, who thought herself
+much better born than these climbers, had a natural contempt. Banksiæ
+will flourish and be content anywhere, they are such easily-pleased
+creatures; and when you cut them they thrive on it, which shows a very
+plebeian and pachydermatous temper; and they laugh all over in the face
+of an April day, shaking their little golden clusters of blossom in
+such a merry way that the Rose-tree, who was herself very reserved and
+thorny, had really scruples about speaking to them.
+
+For she was by nature extremely proud--much prouder than her lineage
+warranted--and a hard fate had fixed her to the wall of an orangery,
+where hardly anybody ever came, except the gardener and his men to
+carry the oranges in winter and out in spring, or water and tend them
+while they were housed there.
+
+She was a handsome rose, and she knew it. But the garden was so
+crowded--like the world--that she could not get herself noticed in it.
+In vain was she radiant and red close on to Christmas-time as in the
+fullest heats of midsummer. Nobody thought about her or praised her.
+She pined and was very unhappy.
+
+The Banksiæ, who are little, frank, honest-hearted creatures, and say
+out what they think, as such plebeian people will, used to tell her
+roundly she was thankless for the supreme excellence of her lot.
+
+“You have everything the soul of a rose can wish for: a splendid old
+wall with no nasty chinks in it; a careful gardener, who nips all the
+larvæ in the bud before they can do you any damage; sun, water, care;
+above all, nobody ever cuts a single blossom off you! What more can you
+wish for? This orangery is paradise!”
+
+She did not answer.
+
+What wounded her pride so deeply was just this fact, that they never
+_did_ cut off any of her blossoms. When day after day, year after
+year, she crowned herself with her rich crimson glory and no one ever
+came nigh to behold or to gather it, she could have died with vexation
+and humiliation.
+
+Would nobody see she was worth anything?
+
+The truth was that in this garden there was such an abundance of very
+rare roses that a common though beautiful one like Rosa Damascena
+remained unthought of; she was lovely, but then there were so many
+lovelier still, or, at least, much more _à la mode_.
+
+In the secluded garden-corner she suffered all the agonies of a pretty
+woman in the great world, who is only a pretty woman, and no more. It
+needs so _very_ much more to be “somebody.” To be somebody was
+what Rosa Damascena sighed for, from rosy dawn to rosier sunset.
+
+From her wall she could see across the green lawns, the great parterre
+which spread before the house terrace, and all the great roses that
+bloomed there--Her Majesty Gloire de Dijon, who was a reigning
+sovereign born, the royally-born Niphétos, the Princesse Adelaïde,
+the Comtesse Ouvaroff, the Vicomtesse de Cazes all in gold, Madame de
+Sombreuil in snowy white, the beautiful Louise de Savoie, the exquisite
+Duchess of Devoniensis--all the roses that were great ladies in their
+own right, and as far off from her as were the stars that hung in
+heaven. Rosa Damascena would have given all her brilliant carnation
+hues to be pale and yellow like the Princesse Adelaïde, or delicately
+colorless like Her Grace of Devoniensis.
+
+[Illustration: ONE DAY THE GARDENER APPROACHED AND STOOD AND LOOKED AT
+HER]
+
+She tried all she could to lose her own warm blushes, and prayed that
+bees might sting her and so change her hues; but the bees were of low
+taste, and kept their pearl-powder and rouge and other pigments for the
+use of common flowers, like the evening primrose or the buttercup and
+borage, and never came near to do her any good in arts of toilet.
+
+One day the gardener approached and stood and looked at her: then all
+at once she felt a sharp stab in her from his knife, and a vivid pain
+ran downward through her stem.
+
+She did not know it, but gardeners and gods “this way grant prayer.”
+
+“Has not something happened to me?” she asked of the little Banksiæ;
+for she felt very odd all over her; and when you are unwell you cannot
+be very haughty.
+
+The saucy Banksiæ laughed, running over their wires that they cling to
+like little children.
+
+“You have got your wish,” they said. “You are going to be a great lady;
+they have made you into a Rosa Indica!”
+
+A tea-rose! Was it possible?
+
+Was she going to belong at last to that grand and graceful order, which
+she had envied so long and vainly from afar?
+
+Was she, indeed, no more mere simple Rosa Damascena? She felt so
+happy she could hardly breathe. She thought it was her happiness that
+stifled her; in real matter of fact it was the tight bands in which the
+gardener had bound her.
+
+“Oh, what joy!” she thought, though she still felt very uncomfortable,
+but not for the world would she ever have admitted it to the Banksiæ.
+
+The gardener had tied a tin tube on to her, and it was heavy and
+cumbersome; but no doubt, she said, to herself, the thing was
+fashionable, so she bore the burden of it very cheerfully.
+
+The Banksiæ asked her how she felt; but she would not deign even to
+reply; and when a friendly blackbird, who had often picked grubs off
+her leaves, came and sang to her, she kept silent: a Rosa Indica was
+far above a blackbird.
+
+“Next time you want a caterpillar taken away, he may eat you for
+_me_!” said the blackbird, and flew off in a huff.
+
+She was very ungrateful to hate the blackbird so, for he had been most
+useful to her in doing to death all the larvæ of worms and beetles and
+caterpillars and other destroyers which were laid treacherously within
+her leaves. The good blackbird, with many another feathered friend,
+was forever at work in some good deed of the kind, and all the good,
+grateful flowers loved him and his race. But to this terribly proud and
+discontented Rosa Damascena he had been a bore, a common creature, a
+nuisance, a monster--any one of these things by turns, and sometimes
+all of them altogether. She used to long for the cat to get him.
+
+“You ought to be such a happy rose!” the merle had said to her, one
+day. “There is no rose so strong and healthy as you are, except the
+briers.”
+
+And from that day she had hated him. The idea of naming those hedgerow
+brier roses in the same breath with her!
+
+You would have seen in that moment of her rage a very funny sight had
+you been there; nothing less funny than a rose-tree trying to box a
+blackbird’s ears!
+
+But, to be sure, you would only have thought the wind was blowing about
+the rose, so you would have seen nothing really of the drollery of it
+all, which was not droll at all to Rosa Damascena, for a wound in one’s
+vanity is as long healing as a wound from a conical bullet in one’s
+body. The blackbird had not gone near her after that, nor any of his
+relations and friends, and she had had a great many shooting and flying
+pains for months together, in consequence of aphides’ eggs having been
+laid inside her stem--eggs of which the birds would have eased her long
+before if they had not been driven away by her haughty rage.
+
+However, she had been almost glad to have some ailment. She had called
+it aneurism, and believed it made her look refined and interesting. If
+it would only have made her pale! But it had not done that: she had
+remained of the richest rose color.
+
+When the winter had passed and the summer had come round again, the
+grafting had done its work: she was really a Rosa Indica, and timidly
+put forth the first blossom in her new estate. It was a small, rather
+puny yellowish thing, not to be compared to her own natural red
+clusters, but she thought it far finer.
+
+Scarcely had it been put forth by her than the gardener whipped it
+off with his knife, and bore it away in proof of his success in such
+transmogrifications.
+
+She had never felt the knife before, when she had been only Rosa
+Damascena: it hurt her very much, and her heart bled.
+
+“Il faut souffrir pour être belle,” said the Banksiæ in a good-natured
+effort at consolation. She was not going to answer them, and she made
+believe that her tears were only dew, though it was high noon and all
+the dew-drops had been drunk by the sun, who by noon-time gets tired of
+climbing and grows thirsty.
+
+Her next essay was much finer, and the knife whipped that off also.
+That summer she bore more and more blossoms, and always the knife cut
+them away, for she had been made one of the great race of Rosa Indica.
+
+Now, a rose-tree, when a blossom is chopped or broken off, suffers
+precisely as we human mortals do if we lose a finger; but the
+rose-tree, being a much more perfect and delicate handiwork of nature
+than any human being, has a faculty we have not: it lives and has a
+sentient soul in every one of its roses, and whatever one of these
+endures the tree entire endures also by sympathy. You think this
+very wonderful? Not at all. It is no whit more wonderful than that a
+lizard’s tail chopped off runs about by itself, or that a dog can scent
+a foe or a thief whilst the foe or the thief is yet miles away. All
+these things are most wonderful, or not at all so--just as you like.
+
+In a little while she bore another child: this time it was a fine
+fair creature, quite perfect in its hues and shapes. “I never saw a
+prettier!” said an emperor butterfly, pausing near for a moment; at
+that moment the knife of the gardener severed the rosebud’s stalk.
+
+“The lady wants one for her bouquet de corsage: she goes to the opera
+to-night,” the man said to another man, as he took the young tea-rose.
+
+“What is the opera?” asked the mother-rose wearily of the butterfly.
+He did not know; but his cousin the death’s-head moth, asleep under a
+magnolia-leaf, looked down with a grim smile on his quaint face.
+
+“It is where everything dies in ten seconds,” he answered. “It is a
+circle of fire; many friends of mine have flown in, none ever returned:
+your daughter will shrivel up and perish miserably. One pays for
+glory.”
+
+The rose-tree shivered through all her stalks; but she was still proud,
+and tried to think that all this was said only out of envy. What should
+an old death’s-head moth know, whose eyes were so weak that a farthing
+rushlight blinded them?
+
+So she lifted herself a little higher, and would not even see that the
+Banksiæ were nodding to her; and as for her old friend the blackbird,
+how vulgar he looked, bobbing up and down hunting worms and woodlice!
+could anything be more outrageously vulgar than that staring yellow
+beak of his? She twisted herself round not to see him, and felt quite
+annoyed that he went on and sang just the same, unconscious of, or
+indifferent to, her coldness.
+
+With each successive summer Rosa Damascena became more integrally and
+absolutely a Rosa Indica, and suffered in proportion to her fashion and
+fame.
+
+True, people came continually to look at her, and especially in
+May-time would cry aloud, “What a beautiful Niphétos!” But then she was
+bereaved of all her offspring, for, being of the race of Niphétos, they
+were precious, and one would go to die in an hour in a hot ball-room,
+and another to perish in a Sèvres vase, where the china indeed was
+exquisite but the water was foul, and others went to be suffocated in
+the vicious gases of what the mortals call an opera-box, and others
+were pressed to death behind hard diamonds in a woman’s bosom; in
+one way or another they each and all perish miserably. She herself
+also lost many of her once luxuriant leaves, and had a little scanty
+foliage, red-brown in summer, instead of the thick, dark-green clothing
+that she had worn when a rustic maiden. Not a day passed but the knife
+stabbed her; when the knife had nothing to take she was barren and
+chilly, for she had lost the happy power of looking beautiful all the
+year round, which once she had possessed.
+
+One day came when she was taken up out of the ground and borne into a
+glass house, placed in a large pot, and lifted up on to a pedestal,
+and left in a delicious atmosphere, with patrician plants all around
+her with long Latin names, and strange, rare beauties of their own.
+She bore bud after bud in this crystal temple, and became a very crown
+of blossom; and her spirit grew so elated, and her vanity so supreme,
+that she ceased to remember she had ever been a simple Rosa Damascena,
+except that she was always saying to herself, “How great I am! how
+great I am!” which she might have noticed that those born ladies,
+the Devoniensis and the Louise de Savoie, never did. But she noticed
+nothing except her own beauty, which she could see in a mirror that was
+let into the opposite wall of the greenhouse. Her blossoms were many
+and all quite perfect, and no knife touched them; and though to be sure
+she was still very scantily clothed so far as foliage went, yet she was
+all the more fashionable for that, so what did it matter?
+
+One day, when her beauty was at its fullest perfection, she heard
+all the flowers about her bending and whispering with rustling and
+murmuring, saying, “Who will be chosen? who will be chosen?”
+
+Chosen for what?
+
+They did not talk much to her, because she was but a new-comer and a
+parvenu, but she gathered from them in a little time that there was to
+be a ball for a marriage festivity at the house to which the greenhouse
+was attached. Each flower wondered if it would be chosen to go to it.
+The azaleas knew they would go, because they were in their pink or rose
+ball-dresses all ready; but no one else was sure. The rose-tree grew
+quite sick and faint with hope and fear. Unless she went, she felt that
+life was not worth the living. She had no idea what a ball might be,
+but she knew that it was another form of greatness, when she was all
+ready, too, and so beautiful!
+
+The gardener came and sauntered down the glass house, glancing from one
+to another. The hearts of all beat high. The azaleas only never changed
+color: they were quite sure of themselves. Who could do without them in
+February?
+
+“Oh, take me! take me! take me!” prayed the rose-tree, in her foolish,
+longing, arrogant heart.
+
+Her wish was given her. The lord of their fates smiled when he came to
+where she stood.
+
+“This shall be for the place of honor,” he murmured, and he lifted her
+out of the large vase she lived in on to a trestle and summoned his
+boys to bear her away. The very azaleas themselves grew pale with envy.
+
+As for the rose-tree herself, she would not look at any one; she was
+carried through the old garden straight past the Banksiæ, but she would
+make them no sign; and as for the blackbird, she hoped a cat had eaten
+him! Had he not known her as Rosa Damascena?
+
+She was borne bodily, roots and all, carefully wrapped up in soft
+matting, and taken into the great house.
+
+It was a very great house, a very grand house, and there was to be a
+marvellous feast in it, and a prince and princess from over the seas
+were that night to honor the mistress of it by their presence. All
+this Rosa Indica had gathered from the chatter of the flowers, and
+when she came into the big palace she saw many signs of excitement and
+confusion: servants out of livery were running up against one another
+in their hurry-scurry; miles and miles, it seemed, of crimson carpeting
+were being unrolled all along the terrace and down the terrace steps,
+since by some peculiar but general impression royal personages are
+supposed not to like to walk upon anything else, though myself I think
+they must get quite sick of red carpet, seeing so very much of it
+spread for them wherever they go. To Rosa Indica, however, the bright
+scarlet carpeting looked very handsome, and seemed, indeed, a foretaste
+of heaven.
+
+Soon she was carried quite inside the house, into an immense room with
+a beautiful dome-shaped ceiling, painted in fresco three centuries
+before, and fresh as though it had been painted yesterday. At the end
+of the room was a great chair, gilded and painted, too, three centuries
+before, and covered with velvet, gold-fringed and powdered with golden
+grasshoppers. “That common insect here!” thought Rosa, in surprise,
+for she did not know that the chief of the house, long, long, long ago,
+when sleeping in the heat of noon in Palestine in the first crusade,
+had been awakened by a grasshopper lighting on his eyelids, and so had
+been aroused in time to put on his armor and do battle with a troop of
+attacking Saracen cavalry, and beat them; wherefore, in gratitude, he
+had taken the humble field-creature as his badge for evermore.
+
+They set the roots of Rosa Indica now into a vase--such a vase! the
+royal blue of Sèvres, if you please, and with border and scroll work
+and all kinds of wonders and glories painted on it and gilded on
+it, and standing four feet high if it stood one inch! I could never
+tell you the feelings of Rosa if I wrote a thousand pages. Her heart
+thrilled so with ecstasy that she almost dropped all her petals, only
+her vanity came to her aid, and helped her to control in a measure her
+emotions. The gardeners broke off a good deal of mould about her roots,
+and they muttered one to another something about her dying of it. But
+Rosa thought no more of that than a pretty lady does when her physician
+tells her she will die of tight lacing; not she! She was going to be
+put into that Sèvres vase.
+
+This was enough for her, as it is enough for the lady that she is
+going to be put into a hundred-guinea ball-gown.
+
+In she went. It was certainly a tight fit, as the gown often is, and
+Rosa felt nipped, strained, bruised, suffocated. But an old proverb has
+settled long ago that pride feels no pain, and perhaps the more foolish
+the pride the less is the pain that is felt--for the moment.
+
+They set her well into the vase, putting green moss over her roots, and
+then they stretched her branches out over a gilded trellis-work at the
+back of the vase. And very beautiful she looked; and she was at the
+head of the room, and a huge mirror down at the farther end opposite to
+her showed her own reflection. She was in paradise!
+
+“At last,” she thought to herself, “at last they have done me justice!”
+
+The azaleas were all crowded round underneath her, like so many
+kneeling courtiers, but they were not taken out of their pots; they
+were only shrouded in moss. They had no Sèvres vases. And they had
+always thought so much of themselves and given themselves such airs,
+for there is nothing so vain as an azalea--except, indeed, a camellia,
+which is the most conceited flower in the world, though, to do it
+justice, it is also the most industrious, for it is busy getting ready
+its next winter buds whilst the summer is still hot and broad on the
+land, which is very wise and prudent in it and much to be commended.
+
+Well, there was Rosa Indica at the head of the room in the Sèvres vase,
+and very proud and triumphant she felt throned there, and the azaleas,
+of course, were whispering enviously underneath her, “Well, after all,
+she was only Rosa Damascena not so _very_ long ago.”
+
+Yes, _they knew_! What a pity it was! They knew she had once
+been Rosa Damascena and never would wash it out of their minds--the
+tiresome, spiteful, malignant creatures!
+
+Even aloft in the vase, in all her glory, the rose could have shed
+tears of mortification, and was ready to cry, like Themistocles, “Can
+nobody give us oblivion?”
+
+Nobody could give that, for the azaleas, who were so irritated at
+being below her, were not at all likely to hold their tongues. But
+she had great consolations and triumphs, and began to believe that,
+let them say what they chose, she had never been a common garden-wall
+rose. The ladies of the house came in and praised her to the skies;
+the children ran up to her and clapped their hands and shouted for joy
+at her beauty; a wonderful big green bird came in and hopped before
+her, cocked his head on one side, and said to her, “Pretty Poll! oh,
+_such_ a pretty Poll!”
+
+[Illustration: “PRETTY POLL! OH, SUCH A PRETTY POLL!”]
+
+“Even the birds adore me here!” she thought, not dreaming he was only
+talking of himself; for when you are as vain as was this poor dear
+Rosa, creation is pervaded with your own perfections, and even when
+other people say only “Poll!” you feel sure they are saying “You!” or
+they ought to be if they are not.
+
+So there she stood in her grand Sèvres pot, and she was ready to cry
+with the poet, “The world may end to-night!” Alas! it was not the
+world which was to end. Let me hasten to close this true heart-rending
+history.
+
+There was a great dinner as the sun began to set, and the mistress of
+the house came in on the arm of the great foreign prince; and what did
+the foreign prince do but look up at Rosa, straight up at her, and over
+the heads of the azaleas, and say to his hostess, “What a beautiful
+rose you have there! A Niphétos, is it not?”
+
+And her mistress, who had known her long as simple Rosa Damascena,
+answered, “Yes, sir; it is a Niphétos.”
+
+Oh to have lived for that hour! The silly thing thought it worth all
+her suffering from the gardener’s knife, all the loss of her robust
+health and delightful power of flowering in all four seasons. She was
+a Niphétos, really and truly a Niphétos! and not one syllable hinted
+as to her origin! She began to believe she had been _born_ a
+tea-rose!
+
+The dinner was long and gorgeous; the guests were dazzling in jewels
+and in decorations; the table was loaded with old plate and rare china;
+the prince made a speech and used her as a simile of love and joy and
+purity and peace. The rose felt giddy with triumph and with the fumes
+of the wines around her. Her vase was of purple and gold, and all the
+voices round her said, “Oh, the beautiful rose!” No one noticed the
+azaleas. How she wished that the blackbird could see for a minute, if
+the cat would gobble him up the next!
+
+The day sped on; the châtelaine and her guests went away; the table was
+rearranged; the rose-tree was left in its place of honor; the lights
+were lit; there was the sound of music near at hand; they were dancing
+in other chambers.
+
+Above her hung a chandelier--a circle of innumerable little flames and
+drops that looked like dew or diamonds. She thought it was the sun come
+very close. After it had been there a little while it grew very hot,
+and its rays hurt her.
+
+“Can you not go a little farther away, O Sun?” she said to it. It was
+flattered at being taken for the sun, but answered her, “I am fixed in
+my place. Do you not understand astronomy?”
+
+She did not know what astronomy was, so was silent, and the heat hurt
+her. Still, she was in the place of honor: so she was happy.
+
+People came and went; but nobody noticed her. They ate and drank, they
+laughed and made love, and then went away to dance again, and the music
+went on all night long, and all night long the heat of the chandelier
+poured down on her.
+
+“I am in the place of honor,” she said to herself a thousand times in
+each hour.
+
+But the heat scorched her, and the fumes of the wines made her faint.
+She thought of the sweet fresh air of the old garden where the Banksiæ
+were. The garden was quite near, but the windows were closed, and there
+were the walls now between her and it. She was in the place of honor.
+But she grew sick and waxed faint as the burning rays of the artificial
+light shining above her seemed to pierce through and through her like
+lances of steel. The night seemed very long. She was tired.
+
+She was erect there on her Sèvres throne, with the light thrilling and
+throbbing upon her in every point. But she thought of the sweet, dark,
+fresh nights in the old home where the blackbird had slept, and she
+longed for them.
+
+The dancers came and went, the music thrummed and screamed, the
+laughter was both near and far; the rose-tree was amidst it all. Yet
+she felt alone--all alone! as travellers may feel in a desert. Hour
+succeeded hour; the night wore on apace; the dancers ceased to come;
+the music ceased, too; the light still burned down upon her, and the
+scorching fever of it consumed her like fire.
+
+Then there came silence--entire silence. Servants came round and put
+out all the lights--hundreds and hundreds of lights--quickly one by
+one. Other servants went to the windows and threw them wide open to
+let out the fumes of wine. Without, the night was changing into the
+gray that tells of earliest dawn. But it was a bitter frost; the grass
+was white with it; the air was ice. In the great darkness that had now
+fallen on all the scene this deadly cold came around the rose-tree and
+wrapped her in it as in a shroud.
+
+She shivered from head to foot.
+
+The true glacial coldness crept into the hot banqueting-chamber, and
+moved round it in white, misty circles, like steam, like ghosts of the
+gay guests that had gone. All was dark and chill--dark and chill as any
+grave!
+
+What worth was the place of honor now?
+
+Was this the place of honor?
+
+The rose-tree swooned and drooped! A servant’s rough hand shook down
+its worn beauty into a heap of fallen leaves. When they carried her
+out dead in the morning, the little Banksia-buds, safe hidden from the
+frost within their stems, waiting to come forth when the summer should
+come, murmured to one another:
+
+“She had her wish; she was great. This way the gods grant foolish
+prayers, and punish discontent!”
+
+
+
+
+                         =TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
+
+Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced
+quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
+otherwise left unbalanced.
+
+Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
+predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
+were not changed.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75655 ***
diff --git a/75655-h/75655-h.htm b/75655-h/75655-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cd4f9c4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75655-h/75655-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,2243 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <title>
+      Moufflou and other stories | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
+    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+    <style>
+
+body {
+    margin-left: 10%;
+    margin-right: 10%;
+}
+
+/* General headers */
+
+h1 {
+    text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+h2 {
+    text-align: center;
+    font-weight: bold;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+    }
+
+p {
+    margin-top: .51em;
+    text-align: justify;
+    margin-bottom: .49em;
+    text-indent: 1.5em;
+}
+
+.nind {text-indent:0;}
+
+.nindc {text-align:center; text-indent:0;}
+
+.large {font-size: 125%;}
+
+.space-above2 { margin-top: 2em; }
+.space-below2 { margin-bottom: 2em; }
+
+.spa1 {
+    margin-top: 1em
+    }
+
+hr {
+    width: 33%;
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    margin-bottom: 2em;
+    margin-left: 33.5%;
+    margin-right: 33.5%;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+hr.chap {width: 65%; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;}
+@media print { hr.chap {display: none; visibility: hidden;} }
+
+hr.r65 {width: 65%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;}
+ 
+div.chapter {page-break-before: always;}
+h2.nobreak  {page-break-before: avoid;}
+
+ul {margin-left: 3em; padding-left: 0;}
+li {list-style-type: none; padding-left: 2em; text-indent: -2.5em; text-align: left;}
+
+.flex-center {display: flex; justify-content: center;}
+
+table {
+    margin-left: auto;
+    margin-right: auto;
+}
+table.autotable    { border-collapse: collapse; }
+table.autotable td { padding: 0.25em; }
+
+.tdl      {text-align: left;}
+.tdr      {text-align: right;}
+
+.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+    /*  visibility: hidden;  */
+    position: absolute;
+    left: 92%;
+    font-size: small;
+    text-align: right;
+    font-style: normal;
+    font-weight: normal;
+    font-variant: normal;
+    text-indent: 0;
+} /* page numbers */
+
+
+.allsmcap {font-variant: small-caps; text-transform: lowercase;}
+
+
+/* Dropcap */
+
+.dropcap {
+  float: left;
+  font-size: 250%;
+  margin-top:-.7%;
+}
+
+p.dropcap:first-letter
+{
+  color: transparent;
+  visibility: hidden;
+  margin-left: -0.9em;
+}
+
+.caption  {font-weight: normal;
+           font-size: 90%;
+           text-align: right;
+           padding-bottom: 1em;}
+           
+.caption p
+{
+  text-align: center;
+  text-indent: 0;
+  margin: 0.25em 0;
+}
+
+/* Images */
+
+img {max-width: 100%; width: 100%; height: auto;}
+
+
+.figcenter {
+    margin: auto;
+    text-align: center;
+    page-break-inside: avoid;
+    max-width: 100%;
+}
+
+/* Transcriber's notes */
+.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA;
+    color: black;
+    font-size:small;
+    padding:0.5em;
+    margin-bottom:5em;
+    font-family:sans-serif, serif;
+}
+
+    </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75655 ***</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="cover" style="width: 1692px;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="1692" height="2560" alt="Three short stories dealing respectively with a beloved poodle, a tube of black painting pigment, and a rose bush that wants to be better.">
+</figure>
+
+
+<p class="nindc"><span class="large">MOUFFLOU</span></p>
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2"><span class="allsmcap">FIFTH IMPRESSION</span></p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="nindc"><span class="large">THE CHILDREN’S CLASSICS</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="r65">
+
+<p class="nindc">Each beautifully illustrated in color and tastefully bound</p>
+
+<hr class="r65">
+
+<div class="flex-center">
+<ul><li>  FRANCESCA AT HINTERWALD</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By JOHANNA SPYRI</span></span></li>
+
+<li>  THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By WASHINGTON IRVING</span></span></li>
+
+<li>  RIP VAN WINKLE</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By WASHINGTON IRVING</span></span></li>
+
+<li>  TALES OF WASHINGTON IRVING’S ALHAMBRA</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By WASHINGTON IRVING</span></span></li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Simplified by Leila H. Cheney</span></li>
+
+<li>  THE KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By JOHN RUSKIN</span></span></li>
+
+<li>  GULLIVER’S TRAVELS</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By JONATHAN SWIFT</span></span></li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">A Voyage to Lilliput</span></li>
+
+<li>  A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON</span></span></li>
+
+<li>  HANS ANDERSEN’S FAIRY TALES</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Selected</span></li>
+
+<li>  THE LITTLE LAME PRINCE</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By MISS MULOCK</span></span></li>
+
+<li>  THE ADVENTURES OF A BROWNIE</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By MISS MULOCK</span></span></li>
+
+<li>  J. COLE</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By EMMA GELLIBRAND</span></span></li>
+
+<li>  ALL-TIME TALES</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Selected. By Homer P. and Elizabeth Lewis</span></li>
+
+<li>  MONI THE GOAT BOY</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By JOHANNA SPYRI</span></span></li>
+
+<li>  THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By GEORGE MACDONALD</span></span></li>
+
+<li>  THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By GEORGE MACDONALD</span></span></li>
+
+<li>  AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="allsmcap">By GEORGE MACDONALD</span></span></li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Simplified by Elizabeth Lewis</span></li>
+
+<li>  WONDERLAND STORIES</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Selected</span></li>
+
+<li>  THE NÜRNBERG STOVE</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">By OUIDA</span></li>
+
+<li>  A DOG OF FLANDERS</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">By OUIDA</span></li>
+
+<li>  MOUFFLOU AND OTHER STORIES</li>
+<li><span style="margin-left: 2em;">By OUIDA</span></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<figure class="figcenter" id="frontispiece" style="width: 1200px;">
+<img src="images/frontispiece.jpg" width="1200" height="1719" alt="The image is a vintage-style illustration depicting two children and two dogs in a lush garden setting.">
+<figcaption class="caption">
+<p>THEY PLAY WITH MOUFFLOU AND THE POODLE PUPPY HALF THE DAY</p>
+</figcaption>
+</figure>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+</div>
+
+
+<h1>MOUFFLOU<br>
+<span class="allsmcap">AND OTHER STORIES</span></h1>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2"><span class="large">BY</span><br>
+LOUISA DE LA RAMÉ<br>
+(OUIDA)</p>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2"><i>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR BY</i>
+MARIA L. KIRK</p>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2"><i>AND PEN DRAWINGS BY</i>
+EDMUND H. GARRETT</p>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON<br>
+J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">
+<span class="allsmcap">COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY</span></p>
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">
+<span class="allsmcap">PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY<br>
+AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS<br>
+PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tbody><tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdr">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="allsmcap">PAGE</span></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">MOUFFLOU</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">LAMPBLACK</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_65">65</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="ILLUSTRATIONS">ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="nindc">IN COLOR</p>
+
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tbody><tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdr">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="allsmcap">PAGE</span></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">
+THEY PLAY WITH MOUFFLOU AND THE POODLE PUPPY HALF THE DAY</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><i>Frontispiece</i></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">
+“OLD DEPOSIT IS GOING TO BE A SIGN-POST,” THEY CRIED</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_57">57</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">
+ONE DAY THE GARDENER APPROACHED AND STOOD AND LOOKED AT HER</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2">PEN DRAWINGS</p>
+
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tbody><tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdr">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">
+MOUFFLOU ACQUITTED HIMSELF ABLY AS EVER</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_21">21</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="allsmcap">
+“THEN THE MASTER KNEW BEST,” THOUGHT LAMPBLACK</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="tdl">“<span class="allsmcap">
+PRETTY POLL! OH, SUCH A PRETTY POLL!”</span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_84">84</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="MOUFFLOU">MOUFFLOU</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="MOUFFLOU_2">MOUFFLOU</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="nind">
+<span class="dropcap">M</span>OUFFLOU’S masters were some boys and girls. They were very poor, but
+they were very merry. They lived in an old, dark, tumble-down place,
+and their father had been dead five years; their mother’s care was
+all they knew; and Tasso was the eldest of them all, a lad of nearly
+twenty, and he was so kind, so good, so laborious, so cheerful, and
+so gentle, that the children all younger than he adored him. Tasso
+was a gardener. Tasso, however, though the eldest and mainly the
+bread-winner, was not so much Moufflou’s master as was little Romolo,
+who was only ten, and a cripple. Romolo, called generally Lolo, had
+taught Moufflou all he knew, and that all was a very great deal, for
+nothing cleverer than was Moufflou had ever walked upon four legs.</p>
+
+<p>Why Moufflou?</p>
+
+<p>Well, when the poodle had been given to them by a soldier who was going
+back to his home in Piedmont, he had been a white woolly creature of
+a year old, and the children’s mother, who was a Corsican by birth,
+had said that he was just like a <i>moufflon</i>, as they call sheep
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>
+in Corsica. White and woolly this dog remained, and he became the
+handsomest and biggest poodle in all the city, and the corruption of
+Moufflou from Moufflon remained the name by which he was known; it was
+silly, perhaps, but it suited him and the children, and Moufflou he was.</p>
+
+<p>They lived in an old quarter of Florence, in that picturesque zigzag
+which goes round the grand church of Or San Michele, and which is
+almost more Venetian than Tuscan in its mingling of color, charm,
+stateliness, popular confusion, and architectural majesty. The tall old
+houses are weather-beaten into the most delicious hues; the pavement
+is enchantingly encumbered with peddlers and stalls and all kinds of
+trades going on in the open air, in that bright, merry, beautiful
+Italian custom which, alas, alas! is being driven away by new-fangled
+laws which deem it better for the people to be stuffed up in close,
+stewing rooms without air, and would fain do away with all the
+good-tempered politics and the sensible philosophies and the wholesome
+chatter which the open-street trades and street gossipry encourage, for
+it is good for the populace to <i>sfogare</i> and in no other way can
+it do so one-half so innocently. Drive it back into musty shops, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>
+it is driven at once to mutter sedition.... But you want to hear about
+Moufflou.</p>
+
+<p>Well, Moufflou lived here in that high house with the sign of the lamb
+in wrought iron, which shows it was once a warehouse of the old guild
+of the Arte della Lana. They are all old houses here, drawn round about
+that grand church which I called once, and will call again, like a
+mighty casket of oxidized silver. A mighty casket indeed, holding the
+Holy Spirit within it; and with the vermilion and the blue and the
+orange glowing in its niches and its lunettes like enamels, and its
+statues of the apostles strong and noble, like the times in which they
+were created,—St. Peter with his keys, and St. Mark with his open
+book, and St. George leaning on his sword, and others also, solemn and
+austere as they, austere though benign, for do they not guard the White
+Tabernacle of Orcagna within?</p>
+
+<p>The church stands firm as a rock, square as a fortress of stone, and
+the winds and the waters of the skies may beat about it as they will,
+they have no power to disturb its sublime repose. Sometimes I think of
+all the noble things in all our Italy; Or San Michele is the noblest,
+standing there in its stern magnificence, amidst people’s hurrying feet
+and noisy laughter, a memory of God.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span></p>
+
+<p>The little masters of Moufflou lived right in its shadow, where the
+bridge of stone spans the space between the houses and the church high
+in mid-air: and little Lolo loved the church with a great love. He
+loved it in the morning-time, when the sunbeams turned it into dusky
+gold and jasper; he loved it in the evening-time, when the lights of
+its altars glimmered in the dark, and the scent of its incense came
+out in the street; he loved it in the great feasts, when the huge
+clusters of lilies were borne inside it; he loved it in the solemn
+nights of winter; the flickering gleam of the dull lamps shone on the
+robes of an apostle, or the sculpture of a shield, or the glow of a
+casement-moulding in majolica. He loved it always, and, without knowing
+why, he called it <i>la mia chiesa</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Lolo, being lame and of delicate health, was not enabled to go to
+school or to work, though he wove the straw covering of wine-flasks and
+plaited the cane matting with busy fingers. But for the most part he
+did as he liked, and spent most of his time sitting on the parapet of
+Or San Michele, watching the venders of earthenware at their trucks, or
+trotting with his crutch (and he could trot a good many miles when he
+chose) out with Moufflou down a bit of the Stocking-makers’ Street,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>
+along under the arcades of the Uffizi, and so over the Jewellers’
+Bridge, and out by byways that he knew into the fields on the hill-side
+upon the other bank of Arno. Moufflou and he would spend half the
+day—all the day—out there in daffodil-time; and Lolo would come home
+with great bundles and sheaves of golden flowers, and he and Moufflou
+were happy.</p>
+
+<p>His mother never liked to say a harsh word to Lolo, for he was lame
+through her fault: she had let him fall in his babyhood, and the
+mischief had been done to his hip never again to be undone. So she
+never raised her voice to him, though she did often to the others,—to
+curly-pated Cecco, and pretty black-eyed Dina, and saucy Bice, and
+sturdy Beppo, and even to the good, manly, hard-working Tasso. Tasso
+was the mainstay of the whole, though he was but a gardener’s lad,
+working in the green Cascine at small wages. But all he earned he
+brought home to his mother; and he alone kept in order the lazy,
+high-tempered Sandro, and he alone kept in check Bice’s love of finery,
+and he alone could with shrewdness and care make both ends meet and put
+<i>minestra</i> always in the pot and bread always in the cupboard.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span></p>
+
+<p>When his mother thought, as she thought indeed almost ceaselessly,
+that with a few months he would be of the age to draw his number,
+and might draw a high one and be taken from her for three years, the
+poor soul believed her very heart would burst and break; and many a
+day at twilight she would start out unperceived and creep into the
+great church and pour her soul forth in supplication before the White
+Tabernacle.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, pray as she would, no miracle could happen to make Tasso free of
+military service: if he drew a fatal number, go he must, even though he
+take all the lives of them to their ruin with him.</p>
+
+<p>One morning Lolo sat as usual on the parapet of the church, Moufflou
+beside him. It was a brilliant morning in September. The men at the
+hand-barrows and at the stalls were selling the crockery, the silk
+handkerchiefs, and the straw hats which form the staple of the commerce
+that goes on round about Or San Michele,—very blithe, good-natured,
+gay commerce, for the most part, not got through, however, of course,
+without bawling and screaming, and shouting and gesticulating, as if
+the sale of a penny pipkin or a twopenny pie-pan were the occasion
+for the exchange of many thousands of pounds sterling and cause for
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>
+the whole world’s commotion. It was about eleven o’clock; the poor
+petitioners were going in for alms to the house of the fraternity of
+San Giovanni Battista; the barber at the corner was shaving a big man
+with a cloth tucked about his chin, and his chair set well out on the
+pavement; the sellers of the pipkins and pie-pans were screaming till
+they were hoarse, “<i>Un soldo l’uno, due soldi tre!</i>” big bronze
+bells were booming till they seemed to clang right up to the deep-blue
+sky; some brethren of the Misericordia went by bearing a black bier;
+a large sheaf of glowing flowers—dahlias, zinnias, asters, and
+daturas—was borne through the huge arched door of the church near St.
+Mark and his open book. Lolo looked on at it all, and so did Moufflou,
+and a stranger looked at them as he left the church.</p>
+
+<p>“You have a handsome poodle there, my little man,” he said to Lolo, in
+a foreigner’s too distinct and careful Italian.</p>
+
+<p>“Moufflou is beautiful,” said Lolo, with pride. “You should see him
+when he is just washed; but we can only wash him on Sundays, because
+then Tasso is at home.”</p>
+
+<p>“How old is your dog?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Three years old.”</p>
+
+<p>“Does he do any tricks?”</p>
+
+<p>“Does he!” said Lolo, with a very derisive laugh: “Why, Moufflou can do
+anything! He can walk on two legs ever so long; make ready, present,
+and fire; die; waltz; beg, of course; shut a door; make a wheelbarrow
+of himself; there is nothing he will not do. Would you like to see him
+do something?”</p>
+
+<p>“Very much,” said the foreigner.</p>
+
+<p>To Moufflou and to Lolo the street was the same thing as home; this
+cheery <i>piazzetta</i> by the church, so utterly empty sometimes, and
+sometimes so noisy and crowded, was but the wider threshold of their
+home to both the poodle and the child.</p>
+
+<p>So there, under the lofty and stately walls of the old church, Lolo put
+Moufflou through his exercises. They were second nature to Moufflou,
+as to most poodles. He had inherited his address at them from clever
+parents, and, as he had never been frightened or coerced, all his
+lessons and acquirements were but play to him. He acquitted himself
+admirably and the crockery-venders came and looked on, and a sacristan
+came out of the church and smiled, and the barber left his customer’s
+chin all in a lather while he laughed, for the good folk of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>
+quarter were all proud of Moufflou and never tired of him, and the
+pleasant, easy-going, good-humored disposition of the Tuscan populace
+is so far removed from the stupid buckram and whalebone in which the
+new-fangled democracy wants to imprison it.</p>
+
+<p>The stranger also was much diverted by Moufflon’s talents, and said,
+half aloud, “How this clever dog would amuse poor Victor! Would you
+bring your poodle to please a sick child I have at home?” he said,
+quite aloud, to Lolo, who smiled and answered that he would. Where was
+the sick child?</p>
+
+<p>“At the Gran Bretagna; not far off,” said the gentleman. “Come this
+afternoon, and ask for me by this name.”</p>
+
+<p>He dropped his card and a couple of francs into Lolo’s hand, and went
+his way. Lolo, with Moufflou scampering after him, dashed into his own
+house, and stumped up the stairs, his crutch making a terrible noise on
+the stone.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother, mother! see what I have got because Moufflou did his tricks,”
+he shouted. “And now you can buy those shoes you want so much, and the
+coffee that you miss so of a morning, and the new linen for Tasso, and
+the shirts for Sandro.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span></p>
+
+<p>For to the mind of Lolo two francs was as two millions—source
+unfathomable of riches inexhaustible!</p>
+
+<p>With the afternoon he and Moufflou trotted down the arcades of the
+Uffizi and down the Lung’ Arno to the hotel of the stranger, and,
+showing the stranger’s card, which Lolo could not read, they were
+shown at once into a great chamber, all gilding and fresco and velvet
+furniture.</p>
+
+<p>But Lolo, being a little Florentine, was never troubled by externals,
+or daunted by mere sofas and chairs; he stood and looked around him
+with perfect composure; and Moufflou, whose attitude, when he was not
+romping, was always one of magisterial gravity, sat on his haunches and
+did the same.</p>
+
+<p>Soon the foreigner he had seen in the forenoon entered and spoke to
+him, and led him into another chamber, where stretched on a couch was
+a little wan-faced boy about seven years old; a pretty boy, but so
+pallid, so wasted, so helpless. This poor little boy was heir to a
+great name and a great fortune, but all the science in the world could
+not make him strong enough to run about among the daisies, or able to
+draw a single breath without pain. A feeble smile lit up his face as he
+saw Moufflou and Lolo; then a shadow chased it away.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="i001" style="width: 600px;">
+  <img src="images/i001.jpg" width="600" height="926" alt="Three human figures are depicted in a dimly lit room. An elderly man sitting on a chair, leaning forward with an expression of curiosity. A boy with a crutch, bending slightly forward in fear. A girl is reclining in a bed, seemingly reacting to the scene. There is also a dog with mischievous expression.">
+<figcaption class="caption">
+<p>MOUFFLOU ACQUITTED HIMSELF ABLY AS EVER.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+
+<p>“Little boy is lame like me,” he said, in a tongue Lolo did not
+understand.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, but he is a strong little boy, and can move about, as perhaps the
+suns of his country will make you do,” said the gentleman, who was the
+poor little boy’s father. “He has brought you his poodle to amuse you.
+What a handsome dog! is it not?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, <i>bufflins</i>!” said the poor little fellow, stretching out his
+wasted hands to Moufflou, who submitted his leonine crest to the caress.</p>
+
+<p>Then Lolo went through the performance, and Moufflou acquitted himself
+ably as ever; and the little invalid laughed and shouted with his tiny
+thin voice, and enjoyed it all immensely, and rained cakes and biscuits
+on both the poodle and its master. Lolo crumped the pastries with
+willing white teeth, and Moufflou did no less. Then they got up to go,
+and the sick child on the couch burst into fretful lamentations and
+outcries.</p>
+
+<p>“I want the dog! I will have the dog!” was all he kept repeating.</p>
+
+<p>But Lolo did not know what he said, and was only sorry to see him so
+unhappy.</p>
+
+<p>“You shall have the dog to-morrow,” said the gentleman, to pacify his
+little son; and he hurried Lolo and Moufflou out of the room, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span>
+consigned them to a servant, having given Lolo five francs this time.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, Moufflou,” said Lolo, with a chuckle of delight, “if we could
+find a foreigner every day, we could eat meat at supper, Moufflou, and
+go to the theatre every evening!”</p>
+
+<p>And he and his crutch clattered home with great eagerness and
+excitement, and Moufflou trotted on his four frilled feet, the blue
+bow with which Bice had tied up his curls on the top of his head,
+fluttering in the wind. But, alas! even his five francs could bring
+no comfort at home. He found his whole family wailing and mourning in
+utterly inconsolable distress.</p>
+
+<p>Tasso had drawn his number that morning, and the number was seven, and
+he must go and be a conscript for three years.</p>
+
+<p>The poor young man stood in the midst of his weeping brothers and
+sisters, with his mother leaning against his shoulder, and down his own
+brown cheeks the tears were falling. He must go, and lose his place
+in the public gardens, and leave his people to starve as they might,
+and be put in a tomfool’s jacket, and drafted off among cursing and
+swearing and strange faces, friendless, homeless, miserable! And the
+mother,—what would become of the mother?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span></p>
+
+<p>Tasso was the best of lads and the mildest. He was quite happy sweeping
+up the leaves in the long alleys of the Cascine, or mowing the green
+lawns under the ilex avenues, and coming home at supper-time among the
+merry little people and the good woman that he loved. He was quite
+contented; he wanted nothing, only to be let alone; and they would not
+let him alone. They would haul him away to put a heavy musket in his
+hand and a heavy knapsack on his back, and drill him, and curse him,
+and make him into a human target, a live popinjay.</p>
+
+<p>No one had any heed for Lolo and his five francs, and Moufflou,
+understanding that some great sorrow had fallen on his friends, sat
+down and lifted up his voice and howled.</p>
+
+<p>Tasso must go away!—that was all they understood. For three long years
+they must go without the sight of his face, the aid of his strength,
+the pleasure of his smile: Tasso must go! When Lolo understood the
+calamity that had befallen them, he gathered Moufflou up against his
+breast, and sat down, too, on the floor beside him and cried as if he
+would never stop crying.</p>
+
+<p>There was no help for it: it was one of those misfortunes which are,
+as we say in Italian, like a tile tumbled on the head. The tile drops
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>
+from a height, and the poor head bows under the unseen blow. That is
+all.</p>
+
+<p>“What is the use of that?” said the mother, passionately, when Lolo
+showed her his five francs. “It will not buy Tasso’s discharge.”</p>
+
+<p>Lolo felt that his mother was cruel and unjust, and crept to bed with
+Moufflou. Moufflou always slept on Lolo’s feet.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning Lolo got up before sunrise, and he and Moufflou
+accompanied Tasso to his work in the Cascine.</p>
+
+<p>Lolo loved his brother, and clung to every moment whilst they could
+still be together.</p>
+
+<p>“Can nothing keep you, Tasso?” he said, despairingly, as they went down
+the leafy aisles, whilst the Arno water was growing golden as the sun
+rose.</p>
+
+<p>Tasso sighed.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing, dear. Unless Gesú would send me a thousand francs to buy a
+substitute.”</p>
+
+<p>And he knew he might as well have said, “If one could coin gold ducats
+out of the sunbeams on Arno water.”</p>
+
+<p>Lolo was very sorrowful as he lay on the grass in the meadow where
+Tasso was at work, and the poodle lay stretched beside him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span></p>
+
+<p>When Lolo went home to dinner (Tasso took his wrapped in a
+handkerchief) he found his mother very agitated and excited. She was
+laughing one moment, crying the next. She was passionate and peevish,
+tender and jocose by turns; there was something forced and feverish
+about her which the children felt but did not comprehend. She was a
+woman of not very much intelligence, and she had a secret, and she
+carried it ill, and knew not what to do with it; but they could not
+tell that. They only felt a vague sense of disturbance and timidity at
+her unwonted manner.</p>
+
+<p>The meal over (it was only bean-soup, and that is soon eaten), the
+mother said sharply to Lolo, “Your aunt Anita wants you this afternoon.
+She has to go out, and you are needed to stay with the children: be off
+with you.”</p>
+
+<p>Lolo was an obedient child; he took his hat and jumped up as quickly as
+his halting hip would let him. He called Moufflou, who was asleep.</p>
+
+<p>“Leave the dog,” said his mother, sharply. “’Nita will not have him
+messing and carrying mud about her nice clean rooms. She told me so.
+Leave him, I say.”</p>
+
+<p>“Leave Moufflou!” echoed Lolo, for never in all Moufflou’s life
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>
+had Lolo parted from him. Leave Moufflou! He stared open-eyed and
+open-mouthed at his mother. What could have come to her?</p>
+
+<p>“Leave him, I say,” she repeated, more sharply than ever. “Must I speak
+twice to my own children? Be off with you, and leave the dog, I say.”</p>
+
+<p>And she clutched Moufflou by his long silky mane and dragged him
+backwards, whilst with the other hand she thrust out of the door Lolo
+and Bice.</p>
+
+<p>Lolo began to hammer with his crutch at the door thus closed on him;
+but Bice coaxed and entreated him.</p>
+
+<p>“Poor mother has been so worried about Tasso,” she pleaded. “And what
+harm can come to Moufflou? And I do think he was tired, Lolo; the
+Cascine is a long way; and it is quite true that Aunt ’Nita never liked
+him.”</p>
+
+<p>So by one means and another she coaxed her brother away; and they went
+almost in silence to where their aunt Anita dwelt, which was across the
+river, near the dark-red bell-shaped dome of Santa Spirito.</p>
+
+<p>It was true that her aunt had wanted them to mind her room and her
+babies whilst she was away carrying home some lace to a villa outside
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>
+the Roman gate, for she was a lace-washer and clear-starcher by trade.
+There they had to stay in the little dark room with the two babies,
+with nothing to amuse the time except the clang of the bells of the
+church of the Holy Spirit, and the voices of the lemonade-sellers
+shouting in the street below. Aunt Anita did not get back till it was
+more than dusk, and the two children trotted homeward hand in hand,
+Lolo’s leg dragging itself painfully along, for without Moufflou’s
+white figure dancing on before him he felt very tired indeed. It was
+pitch dark when they got to Or San Michele, and the lamps burned dully.</p>
+
+<p>Lolo stumped up the stairs wearily, with a vague, dull fear at his
+small heart.</p>
+
+<p>“Moufflou, Moufflou!” he called. Where was Moufflou? Always at
+the first sound of his crutch the poodle came flying towards him.
+“Moufflou, Moufflou!” he called all the way up the long, dark twisting
+stone stair. He pushed open the door, and he called again, “Moufflou,
+Moufflou!”</p>
+
+<p>But no dog answered to his call.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother, where is Moufflou?” he asked, staring with blinking, dazzled
+eyes into the oil-lit room where his mother sat knitting. Tasso was not
+then home from work. His mother went on with her knitting; there was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>
+an uneasy look on her face.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother, what have you done with Moufflou, <i>my</i> Moufflou?” said
+Lolo, with a look that was almost stern on his ten-year-old face.</p>
+
+<p>Then his mother, without looking up and moving her knitting-needles
+very rapidly, said,—</p>
+
+<p>“Moufflou is sold!”</p>
+
+<p>And little Dina, who was a quick, pert child, cried, with a shrill
+voice,—</p>
+
+<p>“Mother has sold him for a thousand francs to the foreign gentleman.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sold him!”</p>
+
+<p>Lolo grew white and grew cold as ice; he stammered, threw up his hands
+over his head, gasped a little for breath, then fell down in a dead
+swoon, his poor useless limb doubled under him.</p>
+
+<p>When Tasso came home that sad night and found his little brother
+shivering, moaning, and half delirious, and when he heard what had been
+done, he was sorely grieved.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, mother, how could you do it?” he cried. “Poor, poor Moufflou! and
+Lolo loves him so!”</p>
+
+<p>“I have got the money,” said his mother, feverishly, “and you will
+not need to go for a soldier: we can buy your substitute. What is a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span>
+poodle, that you mourn about it? We can get another poodle for Lolo.”</p>
+
+<p>“Another will not be Moufflou,” said Tasso, and yet was seized with
+such a frantic happiness himself at the knowledge that he would not
+need go to the army, that he, too, felt as if he were drunk on new
+wine, and had not the heart to rebuke his mother.</p>
+
+<p>“A thousand francs!” he muttered; “a thousand francs! <i>Dio mio!</i>
+Who could ever have fancied anybody would have given such a price for
+a common white poodle? One would think the gentleman had bought the
+church and the tabernacle!”</p>
+
+<p>“Fools and their money are soon parted,” said his mother, with cross
+contempt.</p>
+
+<p>It was true: she had sold Moufflou.</p>
+
+<p>The English gentleman had called on her while Lolo and the dog had been
+in the Cascine, and had said that he was desirous of buying the poodle,
+which had so diverted his sick child that the little invalid would not
+be comforted unless he possessed it. Now, at any other time the good
+woman would have sturdily refused any idea of selling Moufflou; but
+that morning the thousand francs which would buy Tasso’s substitute
+were forever in her mind and before her eyes. When she heard the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>
+foreigner her heart gave a great leap, and her head swam giddily, and
+she thought, in a spasm of longing—if she could get those thousand
+francs! But though she was so dizzy and so upset she retained her grip
+on her native Florentine shrewdness. She said nothing of her need of
+the money; not a syllable of her sore distress. On the contrary, she
+was coy and wary, affected great reluctance to part with her pet,
+invented a great offer made for him by a director of a circus, and
+finally let fall a hint that less than a thousand francs she could
+never take for poor Moufflou.</p>
+
+<p>The gentleman assented with so much willingness to the price that she
+instantly regretted not having asked double. He told her that if she
+would take the poodle that afternoon to his hotel the money should be
+paid to her; so she despatched her children after their noonday meal in
+various directions, and herself took Moufflou to his doom. She could
+not believe her senses when ten hundred-franc notes were put into
+her hand. She scrawled her signature, Rosina Calabucci, to a formal
+receipt, and went away, leaving Moufflou in his new owner’s rooms, and
+hearing his howls and moans pursue her all the way down the staircase
+and out into the air.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span></p>
+
+<p>She was not easy at what she had done.</p>
+
+<p>“It seemed,” she said to herself, “like selling a Christian.”</p>
+
+<p>But then to keep her eldest son at home—what a joy that was! On the
+whole, she cried so and laughed so as she went down the Lung’ Arno that
+once or twice people looked at her, thinking her out of her senses, and
+a guard spoke to her angrily.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Lolo was sick and delirious with grief. Twenty times he got
+out of his bed and screamed to be allowed to go with Moufflou, and
+twenty times his mother and his brothers put him back again and held
+him down and tried in vain to quiet him.</p>
+
+<p>The child was beside himself with misery. “Moufflou! Moufflou!” he
+sobbed at every moment; and by night he was in a raging fever, and when
+his mother, frightened, ran in and called in the doctor of the quarter,
+that worthy shook his head and said something as to a shock of the
+nervous system, and muttered a long word—“meningitis.”</p>
+
+<p>Lolo took a hatred to the sight of Tasso, and thrust him away, and his
+mother, too.</p>
+
+<p>“It is for you Moufflou is sold,” he said, with his little teeth and
+hands tight clinched.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span></p>
+
+<p>After a day or two Tasso felt as if he could not bear his life, and
+went down to the hotel to see if the foreign gentleman would allow him
+to have Moufflou back for half an hour to quiet his little brother
+by a sight of him. But at the hotel he was told that the <i>Milord
+Inglese</i> who had bought the dog of Rosina Calabucci had gone that
+same night of the purchase to Rome, to Naples, to Palermo, <i>chi
+sa</i>?</p>
+
+<p>“And Moufflou with him?” asked Tasso.</p>
+
+<p>“The <i>barbone</i> he had bought went with him,” said the porter of
+the hotel. “Such a beast! Howling, shrieking, raging all the day, and
+all the paint scratched off the <i>salon</i> door.”</p>
+
+<p>Poor Moufflou! Tasso’s heart was heavy as he heard of that sad helpless
+misery of their bartered favorite and friend.</p>
+
+<p>“What matter?” said his mother, fiercely, when he told her. “A dog is
+a dog. They will feed him better than we could. In a week he will have
+forgotten—<i>chè</i>!”</p>
+
+<p>But Tasso feared that Moufflou would not forget. Lolo certainly would
+not. The doctor came to the bedside twice a day, and ice and water were
+kept on the aching hot little head that had got the malady with the
+long name, and for the chief part of the time Lolo lay quiet, dull,
+and stupid, breathing heavily, and then at intervals cried and sobbed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>
+and shrieked hysterically for Moufflou.</p>
+
+<p>“Can you not get what he calls for to quiet him with a sight of it?”
+said the doctor. But that was not possible, and poor Rosina covered her
+head with her apron and felt a guilty creature.</p>
+
+<p>“Still, you will not go to the army,” she said to Tasso, clinging to
+that immense joy for her consolation. “Only think! we can pay Guido
+Squarcione to go for you. He always said he would go if anybody would
+pay him. Oh, my Tasso, surely to keep you is worth a dog’s life!”</p>
+
+<p>“And Lolo’s?” said Tasso, gloomily. “Nay, mother, it works ill to
+meddle too much with fate. I drew my number; I was bound to go. Heaven
+would have made it up to you somehow.”</p>
+
+<p>“Heaven sent me the foreigner; the Madonna’s own self sent him to ease
+a mother’s pain,” said Rosina, rapidly and angrily. “There are the
+thousand francs safe to hand in the <i>cassone</i>, and what, pray, is
+it we miss? Only a dog like a sheep, that brought gallons of mud in
+with him every time it rained, and ate as much as any one of you.”</p>
+
+<p>“But Lolo?” said Tasso, under his breath.</p>
+
+<p>His mother was so irritated and so tormented by her own conscience
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>
+that she upset all the cabbage broth into the burning charcoal.</p>
+
+<p>“Lolo was always a little fool, thinking of nothing but the church and
+the dog and nasty field-flowers,” she said, angrily. “I humored him
+ever too much because of the hurt to his hip, and so—and so——”</p>
+
+<p>Then the poor soul made matters worse by dropping her tears into the
+saucepan, and fanning the charcoal so furiously that the flame caught
+her fan of cane-leaves, and would have burned her arm had not Tasso
+been there.</p>
+
+<p>“You are my prop and safety always. Who would not have done what I did?
+Not Santa Felicita herself,” she said, with a great sob.</p>
+
+<p>But all this did not cure poor Lolo.</p>
+
+<p>The days and the weeks of the golden autumn weather passed away, and
+he was always in danger, and the small close room where he slept with
+Sandro and Beppo and Tasso was not one to cure such an illness as had
+now beset him. Tasso went to his work with a sick heart in the Cascine,
+where the colchicum was all lilac among the meadow grass, and the ashes
+and elms were taking their first flush of the coming autumnal change.
+He did not think Lolo would ever get well, and the good lad felt as if
+he had been the murderer of his little brother.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span></p>
+
+<p>True, he had had no hand or voice in the sale of Moufflou, but Moufflou
+had been sold for his sake. It made him feel half guilty, very unhappy,
+quite unworthy of all the sacrifice that had been made for him. “Nobody
+should meddle with fate,” thought Tasso, who knew his grandfather
+had died in San Bonifazio because he had driven himself mad over the
+dream-book trying to get lucky numbers for the lottery and become a
+rich man at a stroke.</p>
+
+<p>It was rapture, indeed, to know that he was free of the army for a
+time at least, that he might go on undisturbed at his healthful labor,
+and get a raise in wages as time went on, and dwell in peace with
+his family, and perhaps—perhaps in time earn enough to marry pretty
+flaxen-haired Biondina, the daughter of the barber in the piazzetta. It
+was rapture indeed; but then poor Moufflou!—and poor, poor Lolo! Tasso
+felt as if he had bought his own exemption by seeing his little brother
+and the good dog torn in pieces and buried alive for his service.</p>
+
+<p>And where was poor Moufflou?</p>
+
+<p>Gone far away somewhere south in the hurrying, screeching, vomiting,
+braying train that it made Tasso giddy only to look at as it rushed by
+the green meadows beyond the Cascine on its way to the sea.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span></p>
+
+<p>“If he could see the dog he cries so for, it might save him,” said the
+doctor, who stood with a grave face watching Lolo.</p>
+
+<p>But that was beyond any one’s power. No one could tell where Moufflou
+was. He might be carried away to England, to France, to Russia, to
+America—who could say? They did not know where his purchaser had gone.
+Moufflou even might be dead.</p>
+
+<p>The poor mother, when the doctor said that, went and looked at the ten
+hundred-franc notes that were once like angels’ faces to her, and said
+to them,—</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you children of Satan, why did you tempt me? I sold the poor,
+innocent, trustful beast to get you, and now my child is dying!”</p>
+
+<p>Her eldest son would stay at home, indeed; but if this little lame one
+died! Rosina Calabucci would have given up the notes and consented
+never to own five francs in her life if only she could have gone back
+over the time and kept Moufflou, and seen his little master running out
+with him into the sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>More than a month went by, and Lolo lay in the same state, his
+yellow hair shorn, his eyes dilated and yet stupid, life kept in
+him by a spoonful of milk, a lump of ice, a drink of lemon-water;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>
+always muttering, when he spoke at all. “Moufflou, Moufflou, <i>dov’
+è</i> Moufflou?” and lying for days together in somnolence and
+unconsciousness, with the fire eating at his brain and the weight lying
+on it like a stone.</p>
+
+<p>The neighbors were kind, and brought fruit and the like, and sat up
+with him, and chattered so all at once in one continuous brawl that
+they were enough in themselves to kill him, for such is ever the
+Italian fashion of sympathy in all illness.</p>
+
+<p>But Lolo did not get well, did not even seem to see the light at all,
+or to distinguish any sounds around him; and the doctor in plain words
+told Rosina Calabucci that her little boy must die. Die, and the church
+so near? She could not believe it. Could St. Mark, and St. George, and
+the rest that he had loved so do nothing for him? No, said the doctor,
+they could do nothing; the dog might do something, since the brain had
+so fastened on that one idea; but then they had sold the dog.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; I sold him!” said the poor mother, breaking into floods of
+remorseful tears.</p>
+
+<p>So at last the end drew so nigh that one twilight time the priest
+came out of the great arched door that is next St. Mark, with the
+Host uplifted, and a little acolyte ringing the bell before it, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span>
+passed across the piazzetta, and went up the dark staircase of Rosina’s
+dwelling, and passed through the weeping, terrified children, and went
+to the bedside of Lolo.</p>
+
+<p>Lolo was unconscious, but the holy man touched his little body and
+limbs with the sacred oil, and prayed over him, and then stood
+sorrowful with bowed head.</p>
+
+<p>Lolo had had his first communion in the summer, and in his preparation
+for it had shown an intelligence and devoutness that had won the
+priest’s gentle heart.</p>
+
+<p>Standing there, the holy man commended the innocent soul to God. It
+was the last service to be rendered to him save that very last of all
+when the funeral office should be read above his little grave among the
+millions of nameless dead at the sepulchres of the poor at Trebbiano.</p>
+
+<p>All was still as the priest’s voice ceased; only the sobs of the mother
+and of the children broke the stillness as they kneeled; the hand of
+Biondina had stolen into Tasso’s.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, there was a loud scuffling noise; hurrying feet came patter,
+patter, patter up the stairs; a ball of mud and dust flew over the
+heads of the kneeling figures, fleet as the wind Moufflou dashed
+through the room and leaped upon the bed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span></p>
+
+<p>Lolo opened his heavy eyes, and a sudden light of consciousness gleamed
+in them like a sunbeam. “Moufflou!” he murmured, in his little thin
+faint voice. The dog pressed close to his breast and kissed his wasted
+face.</p>
+
+<p>Moufflou was come home!</p>
+
+<p>And Lolo came home too, for death let go its hold upon him. Little
+by little, very faintly and flickeringly and very uncertainly at
+the first, life returned to the poor little body, and reason to the
+tormented, heated little brain. Moufflou was his physician; Moufflou,
+who, himself a skeleton under his matted curls, would not stir from his
+side and looked at him all day long with two beaming brown eyes full of
+unutterable love.</p>
+
+<p>Lolo was happy; he asked no questions,—was too weak, indeed, even to
+wonder. He had Moufflou—that was enough.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! though they dared not say so in his hearing, it was not enough
+for his elders. His mother and Tasso knew that the poodle had been
+sold and paid for; that they could lay no claim to keep him; and that
+almost certainly his purchaser would seek him out and assert his
+indisputable right to him. And then how would Lolo ever bear that
+second parting?—Lolo, so weak that he weighed no more than if he had
+been a little bird.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span></p>
+
+<p>Moufflou had, no doubt, travelled a long distance and suffered much. He
+was but skin and bone; he bore the marks of blows and kicks; his once
+silken hair was all discolored and matted; he had, no doubt, travelled
+far. But then his purchaser would be sure to ask for him, soon or late,
+at his old home; and then? Well, then if they did not give him up
+themselves, the law would make them.</p>
+
+<p>Rosina Calabucci and Tasso, though they dared say nothing before any of
+the children, felt their hearts in their mouths at every step on the
+stair, and the first interrogation of Tasso every evening when he came
+from his work was, “Has any one come for Moufflou?” For ten days no one
+came, and their first terrors lulled a little.</p>
+
+<p>On the eleventh morning, a feast-day, on which Tasso was not going to
+his labors in the Cascine, there came a person, with a foreign look,
+who said the words they so much dreaded to hear: “Has the poodle that
+you sold to an English gentleman come back to you?”</p>
+
+<p>Yes: his English master claimed him!</p>
+
+<p>The servant said that they had missed the dog in Rome a few days after
+buying him and taking him there; that he had been searched for in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>
+vain, and that his master had thought it possible the animal might have
+found his way back to his old home: there had been stories of such
+wonderful sagacity in dogs: anyhow, he had sent for him on the chance;
+he was himself back on the Lung’ Arno. The servant pulled from his
+pocket a chain, and said his orders were to take the poodle away at
+once: the little sick gentleman had fretted very much about his loss.</p>
+
+<p>Tasso heard in a very agony of despair. To take Moufflou away now would
+be to kill Lolo,—Lolo so feeble still, so unable to understand, so
+passionately alive to every sight and sound of Moufflou, lying for
+hours together motionless with his hand buried in the poodle’s curls,
+saying nothing, only smiling now and then, and murmuring a word or two
+in Moufflou’s ear.</p>
+
+<p>“The dog did come home,” said Tasso, at length, in a low voice; “angels
+must have shown him the road, poor beast! From Rome! Only to think of
+it, from Rome! And he a dumb thing! I tell you he is here, honestly: so
+will you not trust me just so far as this? Will you let me go with you
+and speak to the English lord before you take the dog away? I have a
+little brother sorely ill——”</p>
+
+<p>He could not speak more, for tears that choked his voice.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span></p>
+
+<p>At last the messenger agreed so far as this. Tasso might go first and
+see the master, but he would stay here and have a care they did not
+spirit the dog away,—“for a thousand francs were paid for him,” added
+the man, “and a dog that can come all the way from Rome by itself must
+be an uncanny creature.”</p>
+
+<p>Tasso thanked him, went up-stairs, was thankful that his mother was at
+mass and could not dispute with him, took the ten hundred-franc notes
+from the old oak <i>cassone</i>, and with them in his breast-pocket
+walked out into the air. He was but a poor working lad, but he had made
+up his mind to do an heroic deed, for self-sacrifice is always heroic.
+He went straightway to the hotel where the English <i>milord</i>
+was, and when he had got there remembered that still he did not know
+the name of Moufflou’s owner; but the people of the hotel knew him
+as Rosina Calabucci’s son, and guessed what he wanted, and said the
+gentleman who had lost the poodle was within up-stairs and they would
+tell him.</p>
+
+<p>Tasso waited some half-hour with his heart beating sorely against the
+packet of hundred-franc notes. At last he was beckoned up-stairs, and
+there he saw a foreigner with a mild fair face, and a very lovely lady
+and a delicate child who was lying on a couch. “Moufflou! Where is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>
+Moufflou?” cried the little child, impatiently, as he saw the youth
+enter.</p>
+
+<p>Tasso took his hat off, and stood in the doorway an embrowned, healthy,
+not ungraceful figure, in his working-clothes of rough blue stuff.</p>
+
+<p>“If you please, most illustrious,” he stammered, “poor Moufflou has
+come home.”</p>
+
+<p>The child gave a cry of delight; the gentleman and lady one of wonder.
+Come home! All the way from Rome!</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, he has, most illustrious,” said Tasso, gaining courage and
+eloquence; “and now I want to beg something of you. We are poor, and
+I drew a bad number, and it was for that my mother sold Moufflou. For
+myself, I did not know anything of it; but she thought she would buy
+my substitute, and of course she could; but Moufflou is come home, and
+my little brother Lolo, the little boy your most illustrious first saw
+playing with the poodle, fell ill of the grief of losing Moufflou, and
+for a month has lain saying nothing sensible, but only calling for
+the dog, and my old grandfather died of worrying himself mad over the
+lottery numbers, and Lolo was so near dying that the Blessed Host had
+been brought, and the holy oil had been put on him, when all at once
+there rushes in Moufflou, skin and bone, and covered with mud, and at
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>
+the sight of him Lolo comes back to his senses, and that is now ten
+days ago, and though Lolo is still as weak as a new-born thing, he is
+always sensible, and takes what we give him to eat, and lies always
+looking at Moufflou, and smiling, and saying, ‘Moufflou! Moufflou!’
+and, most illustrious, I know well you have bought the dog, and the law
+is with you, and by the law you claim it; but I thought perhaps, as
+Lolo loves him so, you would let us keep the dog, and would take back
+the thousand francs, and myself I will go and be a soldier, and heaven
+will take care of them all somehow.”</p>
+
+<p>Then Tasso, having said all this in one breathless, monotonous
+recitative, took the thousand francs out of his breast-pocket and held
+them out timidly towards the foreign gentleman, who motioned them aside
+and stood silent.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you understand, Victor,” he said, at last, to his little son.</p>
+
+<p>The child hid his face in his cushions.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I did understand something: let Lolo keep him; Moufflou was not
+happy with me.”</p>
+
+<p>But he burst out crying as he said it.</p>
+
+<p>Moufflou had run away from him.</p>
+
+<p>Moufflou had never loved him, for all his sweet cakes and fond
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>
+caresses and platefuls of delicate savory meats. Moufflou had run away
+and found his own road over two hundred miles and more to go back to
+some little hungry children, who never had enough to eat themselves,
+and so, certainly, could never give enough to eat to the dog. Poor
+little boy! He was so rich and so pampered and so powerful, and yet he
+could never make Moufflou love him!</p>
+
+<p>Tasso, who understood nothing that was said, laid the ten hundred-franc
+notes down on a table near him.</p>
+
+<p>“If you would take them, most illustrious, and give me back what my
+mother wrote when she sold Moufflou,” he said, timidly, “I would pray
+for you night and day, and Lolo would too; and as for the dog, we will
+get a puppy and train him for your little <i>signorino</i>; they can
+all do tricks, more or less, it comes by nature; and as for me, I will
+go to the army willingly; it is not right to interfere with fate; my
+old grandfather died mad because he would try to be a rich man, by
+dreaming about it and pulling destiny by the ears, as if she were a
+kicking mule; only, I do pray of you, do not take away Moufflou. And
+to think he trotted all those miles and miles, and you carried him by
+train, too, and he never could have seen the road, and he has no power
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>
+of speech to ask——”</p>
+
+<p>Tasso broke down again in his eloquence, and drew the back of his hand
+across his wet eyelashes.</p>
+
+<p>The English gentleman was not altogether unmoved.</p>
+
+<p>“Poor faithful dog!” he said, with a sigh. “I am afraid we were very
+cruel to him, meaning to be kind. No; we will not claim him, and I do
+not think you should go for a soldier; you seem so good a lad, and your
+mother must need you. Keep the money, my boy, and in payment you shall
+train up the puppy you talk of, and bring him to my little boy. I will
+come and see your mother and Lolo to-morrow. All the way from Rome!
+What wonderful sagacity! what matchless fidelity!”</p>
+
+<p>You can imagine, without any telling of mine, the joy that reigned in
+Moufflou’s home when Tasso returned thither with the money and the good
+tidings both. His substitute was bought without a day’s delay, and
+Lolo rapidly recovered. As for Moufflou, he could never tell them his
+troubles, his wanderings, his difficulties, his perils; he could never
+tell them by what miraculous knowledge he had found his way across
+Italy, from the gates of Rome to the gates of Florence. But he soon
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>
+grew plump again, and merry, and his love for Lolo was yet greater than
+before.</p>
+
+<p>By the winter all the family went to live on an estate near Spezia that
+the English gentleman had purchased, and there Moufflou was happier
+than ever. The little English boy is gaining strength in the soft air,
+and he and Lolo are great friends, and play with Moufflou and the
+poodle puppy half the day upon the sunny terraces and under the green
+orange boughs. Tasso is one of the gardeners there; he will have to
+serve as a soldier probably in some category or another, but he is safe
+for the time, and is happy. Lolo, whose lameness will always exempt him
+from military service, when he grows to be a man means to be a florist,
+and a great one. He has learned to read, as the first step on the road
+of his ambition.</p>
+
+<p>“But oh, Moufflou, how <i>did</i> you find your way home?” he asks the
+dog a hundred times a week.</p>
+
+<p>How indeed!</p>
+
+<p>No one ever knew how Moufflou had made that long journey on foot, so
+many weary miles; but beyond a doubt he had done it alone and unaided,
+for if any one had helped him they would have come home with him to
+claim the reward.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span></p>
+
+<p>And that you may not wonder too greatly at Moufflou’s miraculous
+journey on his four bare feet, I will add here two facts known to
+friends of mine, of whose truthfulness there can be no doubt.</p>
+
+<p>One concerns a French poodle who was purchased in Paris by the friend
+of my friend, and brought all the way from Paris to Milan by train.
+In a few days after his arrival in Milan the poodle was missing; and
+nothing more was heard or known of him until many weeks later his
+quondam owner in Paris, on opening his door one morning, found the dog
+stretched dying on the threshold of his old home.</p>
+
+<p>That is one fact; not a story, mind you, <i>a fact</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The other is related to me by an Italian nobleman, who in his youth
+belonged to the Guardia Nobile of Tuscany. That brilliant corps of
+elegant gentlemen owned a regimental pet, a poodle also, a fine merry
+and handsome dog of its kind; and the officers all loved and made
+much of him, except, alas! the commandant of the regiment, who hated
+him, because when the officers were on parade or riding in escort the
+poodle was sure to be jumping and frisking about in front of them. It
+is difficult to see where the harm of this was, but this odious old
+martinet vowed vengeance against the dog, and, being of course all
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>
+powerful in his own corps, ordered the exile from Florence of the poor
+fellow. He was sent to a farm at Prato, twenty miles off, along the
+hills; but very soon he found his way back to Florence. He was then
+sent to Leghorn, forty miles off, but in a week’s time had returned to
+his old comrades. He was then, by order of his unrelenting foe, shipped
+to the island of Sardinia. How he did it no one ever could tell, for he
+was carried safely to Sardinia and placed inland there in kind custody,
+but in some wonderful way the poor dog must have found out the sea
+and hidden himself on board a returning vessel, for in a month’s time
+from his exile to the island he was back again among his comrades in
+Florence. Now, what I have to tell you almost breaks my heart to say,
+and will, I think, quite break yours to hear: alas! the brute of a
+commandant, untouched by such marvellous cleverness and faithfulness,
+was his enemy to the bitter end, and, in inexorable hatred, <i>had him
+shot</i>! Oh, when you grow to manhood and have power, use it with
+tenderness!</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LAMPBLACK">LAMPBLACK</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LAMPBLACK_2">LAMPBLACK</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="nind">
+<span class="dropcap">A</span> POOR black paint lay very unhappy in its tube one day alone, having
+tumbled out of an artist’s color-box and lying quite unnoticed for a
+year. “I am only Lampblack,” he said to himself. “The master never
+looks at me: he says I am heavy, dull, lustreless, useless. I wish I
+could cake and dry up and die, as poor Flakewhite did when he thought
+she turned yellow and deserted her.”</p>
+
+<p>But Lampblack could not die; he could only lie in his tin tube and
+pine, like a silly, sorrowful thing as he was, in company with some
+broken bits of charcoal and a rusty palette-knife. The master never
+touched him; month after month passed by, and he was never thought
+of; the other paints had all their turn of fair fortune, and went out
+into the world to great academies and mighty palaces, transfigured and
+rejoicing in a thousand beautiful shapes and services. But Lampblack
+was always passed over as dull and coarse, which indeed he was, and
+knew himself to be so, poor fellow, which made it all the worse. “You
+are only a deposit!” said the other colors to him; and he felt that it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>
+was disgraceful to be a deposit, though he was not quite sure what it
+meant.</p>
+
+<p>“If only I were happy like the others!” thought poor, sooty Lampblack,
+sorrowful in his corner. “There is Bistre, now, he is not so very much
+better-looking than I am, and yet they can do nothing without him,
+whether it is a girl’s face or a wimple in a river!”</p>
+
+<p>The others were all so happy in this beautiful, bright studio, whose
+open casements were hung with myrtle and passion-flower, and whose
+silence was filled with the singing of nightingales. Cobalt, with a
+touch or two, became the loveliness of summer skies at morning; the
+Lakes and Carmines bloomed in a thousand exquisite flowers and fancies;
+the Chromes and Ochres (mere dull earths) were allowed to spread
+themselves in sheets of gold that took the shine of the sun into the
+darkest places; Umber, a sombre and gloomy thing, could lurk yet in a
+child’s curls and laugh in a child’s smiles; whilst all the families of
+the Vermilions, the Blues, the Greens, lived in a perpetual glory of
+sunset or sunrise, of ocean waves or autumn woods, of kingly pageant or
+of martial pomp.</p>
+
+<p>It was very hard. Poor Lampblack felt as if his very heart would
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>
+break, above all when he thought of pretty little Rose Madder, whom he
+loved dearly, and who never would even look at him, because she was
+so very proud, being herself always placed in nothing less than rosy
+clouds, or the hearts of roses, or something as fair and spiritual.</p>
+
+<p>“I am only a wretched deposit!” sighed Lampblack, and the rusty
+palette-knife grumbled back, “My own life has been ruined in cleaning
+dirty brushes, and see what the gratitude of men and brushes is!”</p>
+
+<p>“But at least you have been of use once; but I never am—never!” said
+Lampblack, wearily; and indeed he had been there so long that the
+spiders had spun their silver fleeces all about him, and he was growing
+as gray as an old bottle does in a dark cellar.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the door of the studio opened, and there came a flood of
+light, and the step of a man was heard: the hearts of all the colors
+jumped for joy, because the step was that of their magician, who out
+of mere common clays and ground ores could raise them at a touch into
+splendors of the gods and divinities immortal.</p>
+
+<p>Only the heart of poor dusty Lampblack could not beat a throb the more,
+because he was always left alone and never was thought worthy even
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>
+of a glance. He could not believe his senses when this afternoon—oh,
+miracle and ecstasy!—the step of the master crossed the floor to the
+obscured corner where he lay under his spiders’ webs, and the hand of
+the master touched him. Lampblack felt sick and faint with rapture. Had
+recognition come at last?</p>
+
+<p>The master took him up: “You will do for this work,” he said; and
+Lampblack was borne trembling to an easel. The colors, for once in
+their turn neglected, crowded together to watch, looking in their
+bright tin tubes like rows of little soldiers in armor.</p>
+
+<p>“It is the old dull Deposit,” they murmured to one another, and felt
+contemptuous, yet were curious, as scornful people often will be.</p>
+
+<p>“But I am going to be glorious and great,” thought Lampblack, and his
+heart swelled high; for never more would they be able to hurl the name
+of Deposit at him, a name which hurt him none the less, but all the
+more indeed, because it was unintelligible.</p>
+
+<p>“You will do for this work,” said the master, and let Lampblack out of
+his metal prison-house into the light and touched him with the brush
+that was the wand of magic. </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="i002" style="width: 800px;">
+  <img src="images/i002.jpg" width="800" height="1133" alt="A bearded man is wearing a cream-colored smock with visible paint stains. He is seated and painting letters on a wooden sign, with the visible text reading BAL. He holds a paintbrush in his right hand and a wooden palette filled with paint on his left.">
+<figcaption class="caption">
+<p>“OLD DEPOSIT IS GOING TO BE A SIGN-POST,” THEY CRIED</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>“What am I going to be?” wondered Lampblack, as he felt himself taken
+on to a large piece of deal board, so large that he felt he must be
+going to make the outline of an athlete or the shadows of a tempest at
+the least.</p>
+
+<p>Himself he could not tell what he was becoming: he was happy enough and
+grand enough only to be employed, and, as he was being used, began to
+dream a thousand things of all the scenes he would be in, and all the
+hues that he would wear, and all the praise that he would hear when he
+went out into that wonderful great world of which his master was an
+idol. From his secret dreams he was harshly roused; all the colors were
+laughing and tittering round him till the little tin helmets they wore
+shook with their merriment.</p>
+
+<p>“Old Deposit is going to be a sign-post,” they cried to one another so
+merrily that the spiders, who are not companionable creatures, felt
+themselves compelled to come to the doors of their dens and chuckle,
+too. A sign-post! Lampblack, stretched out in an ecstasy upon the
+board, roused himself shivering from his dreams, and gazed at his own
+metamorphosis. He had been made into seven letters, thus:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">BANDITA.</span><br>
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span></p>
+
+<p>This word in the Italian country, where the English painter’s studio
+was, means, Do not trespass, do not shoot, do not show yourself here:
+anything, indeed, that is peremptory and uncivil to all trespassers. In
+these seven letters, outspread upon the board, was Lampblack crucified!</p>
+
+<p>Farewell, ambitious hopes and happy dreams! He had been employed to
+paint a sign-board, a thing stoned by the boys, blown on by the winds,
+gnawed by the rats, and drenched with the winter’s rains. Better the
+dust and the cobwebs of his old corner than such a shame as this!</p>
+
+<p>But help was there none. His fate was fixed. He was dried with a
+drench of turpentine, hastily clothed in a coat of copal, and, ere he
+yet was fully aware of all his misery, was being borne away upon the
+great board out of doors and handed to the gardener. For the master
+was a hasty and ardent man, and had been stung into impatience by
+the slaughter of some favorite blue thrushes in his ilex-trees that
+day, and so in his haste had chosen to do journeyman’s work himself.
+Lampblack was carried out of the studio for the last time, and as the
+door closed on him he heard all the colors laughing, and the laugh of
+little Rose Madder was highest of all as she cried to Naples Yellow,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>
+who was a dandy and made court to her, “Poor old ugly Deposit! He will
+grumble to the owls and the bats now!”</p>
+
+<p>The door shut, shutting him out forever from all that joyous company
+and palace of fair visions, and the rough hands of the gardener grasped
+him and carried him to the edge of the great garden, where the wall
+overlooked the public road, and there fastened him up on high with a
+band of iron round the trunk of a tree.</p>
+
+<p>That night it rained heavily, and the north wind blew, and there was
+thunder also. Lampblack, out in the storm without his tin house to
+shelter him, felt that of all creatures wretched on the face of the
+earth there was not one so miserable as he.</p>
+
+<p>A sign-board! Nothing but a sign-board!</p>
+
+<p>The degradation of a color, created for art and artists, could not be
+deeper or more grievous anywhere. Oh, how he sighed for his tin tube
+and the quiet nook with the charcoal and the palette-knife!</p>
+
+<p>He had been unhappy there indeed, but still had had always some sort of
+hope to solace him,—some chance still remaining that one day fortune
+might smile and he be allowed to be at least the lowest stratum of some
+immortal work.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span></p>
+
+<p>But now hope was there none. His doom, his end, were fixed and
+changeless. Nevermore could he be anything but what he was; and change
+there could be none till weather and time should have done their work
+on him, and he be rotting on the wet earth, a shattered and worm-eaten
+wreck.</p>
+
+<p>Day broke,—a gloomy, misty morning.</p>
+
+<p>From where he was crucified upon the tree-trunk he could no longer even
+see his beloved home, the studio: he could only see a dusky, intricate
+tangle of branches all about him, and below the wall of flint, with the
+Banksia that grew on it, and the hard, muddy highway, drenched from the
+storm of the night.</p>
+
+<p>A man passed in a miller’s cart, and stood up and swore at him, because
+the people had liked to come and shoot and trap the birds of the
+master’s wooded gardens, and knew that they must not do it now.</p>
+
+<p>A slug crawled over him, and a snail also. A woodpecker hammered at him
+with its strong beak. A boy went by under the wall and threw stones
+at him, and called him names. The rain poured down again heavily. He
+thought of the happy painting-room, where it had seemed always summer
+and always sunshine, and where now in the forenoon all the colors
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>
+were marshalling in the pageantry of the Arts, as he had seen them do
+hundreds of times from his lone corner. All the misery of the past
+looked happiness now.</p>
+
+<p>“If I were only dead, like Flakewhite,” he thought; but the stones only
+bruised, they did not kill him: and the iron band only hurt, it did not
+stifle him. For whatever suffers very much, has always so much strength
+to continue to exist. And almost his loyal heart blasphemed and cursed
+the master who had brought him to such a fate as this.</p>
+
+<p>The day grew apace, and noon went by, and with it the rain passed. The
+sun shone out once more, and Lampblack, even imprisoned and wretched as
+he was, could not but see how beautiful the wet leaves looked, and the
+gossamers all hung with rain-drops, and the blue sky that shone through
+the boughs; for he had not lived with a great artist all his days to be
+blind, even in pain, to the loveliness of nature. The sun came out, and
+with it some little brown birds tripped out too,—very simple and plain
+in their costumes and ways, but which Lampblack knew were the loves
+of the poets, for he had heard the master call them so many times in
+summer nights. The little brown birds came tripping and pecking about
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>
+on the grass underneath his tree-trunk, and then flew on the top of the
+wall, which was covered with Banksia and many other creepers. The brown
+birds sang a little song, for though they sing most in the moonlight
+they do sing by day, too, and sometimes all day long. And what they
+sung was this:</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, how happy we are, how happy! No nets dare now be spread for us, no
+cruel boys dare climb, and no cruel shooters fire. We are safe, quite
+safe, and the sweet summer has begun!”</p>
+
+<p>Lampblack listened, and even in his misery was touched and soothed by
+the tender liquid sounds that these little throats poured out among the
+light-yellow bloom of the Banksia flowers. And when one of the brown
+birds came and sat on a branch by him, swaying itself and drinking the
+rain-drops off a leaf, he ventured to ask, as well as he could for the
+iron that strangled him, why they were so safe, and what made them so
+happy.</p>
+
+<p>The bird looked at him in surprise.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you not know?” he said. “It is <i>you</i>!”</p>
+
+<p>“I!” echoed Lampblack, and could say no more, for he feared that the
+bird was mocking him, a poor, silly, rusty black paint, only spread out
+to rot in fair weather and foul. What good could he do to any creature?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="i003" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/i003.jpg" width="600" height="950" alt="A group of birds are gathered around a tree with dense foliage. A sign on the tree reads BANDITA. The illustration shows different bird species perched on branches, in flight, or observing their surroundings.">
+<figcaption class="caption">
+<p>“THEN THE MASTER KNEW BEST,” THOUGHT LAMPBLACK.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>“You,” repeated the nightingale. “Did you not see that man under the
+wall? He had a gun; we should have been dead but for you. We will come
+and sing to you all night long, since you like it; and when we go to
+bed at dawn, I will tell my cousins the thrushes and merles to take our
+places, so that you shall hear somebody singing near you all the day
+long.”</p>
+
+<p>Lampblack was silent.</p>
+
+<p>His heart was too full to speak.</p>
+
+<p>Was it possible that he was of use, after all?</p>
+
+<p>“Can it be true?” he said, timidly.</p>
+
+<p>“Quite true,” said the nightingale.</p>
+
+<p>“Then the master knew best,” thought Lampblack.</p>
+
+<p>Never would he adorn a palace or be adored upon an altar. His high
+hopes were all dead, like last year’s leaves. The colors in the studio
+had all the glories of the world, but he was of use in it, after all;
+he could save these little lives. He was poor and despised, bruised by
+stones and drenched by storms; yet was he content, nailed there upon
+his tree, for he had not been made quite in vain.</p>
+
+<p>The sunset poured its red and golden splendors through the darkness
+of the boughs, and the birds sang all together, shouting for joy and
+praising God.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_AMBITIOUS_ROSE-TREE">THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_AMBITIOUS_ROSE-TREE_2">THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="nind">
+<span class="dropcap">S</span>HE was a Quatre Saison Rose-tree.</p>
+
+<p>She lived in a beautiful old garden with some charming magnolias for
+neighbors: they rather overshadowed her, certainly, because they were
+so very great and grand; but then such shadow as that is preferable,
+as every one knows, to a mere vulgar enjoyment of common daylight, and
+then the beetles went most to the magnolia-blossoms, for being so great
+and grand of course they got very much preyed upon, and this was a vast
+gain for the rose that was near them. She herself leaned against the
+wall of an orange-house, in company with a Banksia, a buoyant, active,
+simple-minded thing, for whom Rosa Damascena, who thought herself
+much better born than these climbers, had a natural contempt. Banksiæ
+will flourish and be content anywhere, they are such easily-pleased
+creatures; and when you cut them they thrive on it, which shows a very
+plebeian and pachydermatous temper; and they laugh all over in the face
+of an April day, shaking their little golden clusters of blossom in
+such a merry way that the Rose-tree, who was herself very reserved and
+thorny, had really scruples about speaking to them.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span></p>
+
+<p>For she was by nature extremely proud—much prouder than her lineage
+warranted—and a hard fate had fixed her to the wall of an orangery,
+where hardly anybody ever came, except the gardener and his men to
+carry the oranges in winter and out in spring, or water and tend them
+while they were housed there.</p>
+
+<p>She was a handsome rose, and she knew it. But the garden was so
+crowded—like the world—that she could not get herself noticed in it.
+In vain was she radiant and red close on to Christmas-time as in the
+fullest heats of midsummer. Nobody thought about her or praised her.
+She pined and was very unhappy.</p>
+
+<p>The Banksiæ, who are little, frank, honest-hearted creatures, and say
+out what they think, as such plebeian people will, used to tell her
+roundly she was thankless for the supreme excellence of her lot.</p>
+
+<p>“You have everything the soul of a rose can wish for: a splendid old
+wall with no nasty chinks in it; a careful gardener, who nips all the
+larvæ in the bud before they can do you any damage; sun, water, care;
+above all, nobody ever cuts a single blossom off you! What more can you
+wish for? This orangery is paradise!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span></p>
+
+<p>She did not answer.</p>
+
+<p>What wounded her pride so deeply was just this fact, that they never
+<i>did</i> cut off any of her blossoms. When day after day, year after
+year, she crowned herself with her rich crimson glory and no one ever
+came nigh to behold or to gather it, she could have died with vexation
+and humiliation.</p>
+
+<p>Would nobody see she was worth anything?</p>
+
+<p>The truth was that in this garden there was such an abundance of very
+rare roses that a common though beautiful one like Rosa Damascena
+remained unthought of; she was lovely, but then there were so many
+lovelier still, or, at least, much more <i>à la mode</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In the secluded garden-corner she suffered all the agonies of a pretty
+woman in the great world, who is only a pretty woman, and no more. It
+needs so <i>very</i> much more to be “somebody.” To be somebody was
+what Rosa Damascena sighed for, from rosy dawn to rosier sunset.</p>
+
+<p>From her wall she could see across the green lawns, the great parterre
+which spread before the house terrace, and all the great roses that
+bloomed there—Her Majesty Gloire de Dijon, who was a reigning
+sovereign born, the royally-born Niphétos, the Princesse Adelaïde,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>
+the Comtesse Ouvaroff, the Vicomtesse de Cazes all in gold, Madame de
+Sombreuil in snowy white, the beautiful Louise de Savoie, the exquisite
+Duchess of Devoniensis—all the roses that were great ladies in their
+own right, and as far off from her as were the stars that hung in
+heaven. Rosa Damascena would have given all her brilliant carnation
+hues to be pale and yellow like the Princesse Adelaïde, or delicately
+colorless like Her Grace of Devoniensis.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="i004" style="width: 900px;">
+<img src="images/i004.jpg" width="900" height="1286" alt="A gardener is wearing a hat, a light-colored shirt with rolled-up sleeves, blue trousers held up by suspenders, and brown shoes. He has a pipe in his mouth and is bending over, carefully handling a red rose.">
+<figcaption class="caption">
+<p>ONE DAY THE GARDENER APPROACHED AND STOOD AND LOOKED AT HER</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>She tried all she could to lose her own warm blushes, and prayed that
+bees might sting her and so change her hues; but the bees were of low
+taste, and kept their pearl-powder and rouge and other pigments for the
+use of common flowers, like the evening primrose or the buttercup and
+borage, and never came near to do her any good in arts of toilet.</p>
+
+<p>One day the gardener approached and stood and looked at her: then all
+at once she felt a sharp stab in her from his knife, and a vivid pain
+ran downward through her stem.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know it, but gardeners and gods “this way grant prayer.”</p>
+
+<p>“Has not something happened to me?” she asked of the little Banksiæ;
+for she felt very odd all over her; and when you are unwell you cannot
+be very haughty.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span></p>
+
+<p>The saucy Banksiæ laughed, running over their wires that they cling to
+like little children.</p>
+
+<p>“You have got your wish,” they said. “You are going to be a great lady;
+they have made you into a Rosa Indica!”</p>
+
+<p>A tea-rose! Was it possible?</p>
+
+<p>Was she going to belong at last to that grand and graceful order, which
+she had envied so long and vainly from afar?</p>
+
+<p>Was she, indeed, no more mere simple Rosa Damascena? She felt so
+happy she could hardly breathe. She thought it was her happiness that
+stifled her; in real matter of fact it was the tight bands in which the
+gardener had bound her.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, what joy!” she thought, though she still felt very uncomfortable,
+but not for the world would she ever have admitted it to the Banksiæ.</p>
+
+<p>The gardener had tied a tin tube on to her, and it was heavy and
+cumbersome; but no doubt, she said, to herself, the thing was
+fashionable, so she bore the burden of it very cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p>The Banksiæ asked her how she felt; but she would not deign even to
+reply; and when a friendly blackbird, who had often picked grubs off
+her leaves, came and sang to her, she kept silent: a Rosa Indica was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span>
+far above a blackbird.</p>
+
+<p>“Next time you want a caterpillar taken away, he may eat you for
+<i>me</i>!” said the blackbird, and flew off in a huff.</p>
+
+<p>She was very ungrateful to hate the blackbird so, for he had been most
+useful to her in doing to death all the larvæ of worms and beetles and
+caterpillars and other destroyers which were laid treacherously within
+her leaves. The good blackbird, with many another feathered friend,
+was forever at work in some good deed of the kind, and all the good,
+grateful flowers loved him and his race. But to this terribly proud and
+discontented Rosa Damascena he had been a bore, a common creature, a
+nuisance, a monster—any one of these things by turns, and sometimes
+all of them altogether. She used to long for the cat to get him.</p>
+
+<p>“You ought to be such a happy rose!” the merle had said to her, one
+day. “There is no rose so strong and healthy as you are, except the
+briers.”</p>
+
+<p>And from that day she had hated him. The idea of naming those hedgerow
+brier roses in the same breath with her!</p>
+
+<p>You would have seen in that moment of her rage a very funny sight had
+you been there; nothing less funny than a rose-tree trying to box a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span>
+blackbird’s ears!</p>
+
+<p>But, to be sure, you would only have thought the wind was blowing about
+the rose, so you would have seen nothing really of the drollery of it
+all, which was not droll at all to Rosa Damascena, for a wound in one’s
+vanity is as long healing as a wound from a conical bullet in one’s
+body. The blackbird had not gone near her after that, nor any of his
+relations and friends, and she had had a great many shooting and flying
+pains for months together, in consequence of aphides’ eggs having been
+laid inside her stem—eggs of which the birds would have eased her long
+before if they had not been driven away by her haughty rage.</p>
+
+<p>However, she had been almost glad to have some ailment. She had called
+it aneurism, and believed it made her look refined and interesting. If
+it would only have made her pale! But it had not done that: she had
+remained of the richest rose color.</p>
+
+<p>When the winter had passed and the summer had come round again, the
+grafting had done its work: she was really a Rosa Indica, and timidly
+put forth the first blossom in her new estate. It was a small, rather
+puny yellowish thing, not to be compared to her own natural red
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>
+clusters, but she thought it far finer.</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely had it been put forth by her than the gardener whipped it
+off with his knife, and bore it away in proof of his success in such
+transmogrifications.</p>
+
+<p>She had never felt the knife before, when she had been only Rosa
+Damascena: it hurt her very much, and her heart bled.</p>
+
+<p>“Il faut souffrir pour être belle,” said the Banksiæ in a good-natured
+effort at consolation. She was not going to answer them, and she made
+believe that her tears were only dew, though it was high noon and all
+the dew-drops had been drunk by the sun, who by noon-time gets tired of
+climbing and grows thirsty.</p>
+
+<p>Her next essay was much finer, and the knife whipped that off also.
+That summer she bore more and more blossoms, and always the knife cut
+them away, for she had been made one of the great race of Rosa Indica.</p>
+
+<p>Now, a rose-tree, when a blossom is chopped or broken off, suffers
+precisely as we human mortals do if we lose a finger; but the
+rose-tree, being a much more perfect and delicate handiwork of nature
+than any human being, has a faculty we have not: it lives and has a
+sentient soul in every one of its roses, and whatever one of these
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>
+endures the tree entire endures also by sympathy. You think this
+very wonderful? Not at all. It is no whit more wonderful than that a
+lizard’s tail chopped off runs about by itself, or that a dog can scent
+a foe or a thief whilst the foe or the thief is yet miles away. All
+these things are most wonderful, or not at all so—just as you like.</p>
+
+<p>In a little while she bore another child: this time it was a fine
+fair creature, quite perfect in its hues and shapes. “I never saw a
+prettier!” said an emperor butterfly, pausing near for a moment; at
+that moment the knife of the gardener severed the rosebud’s stalk.</p>
+
+<p>“The lady wants one for her bouquet de corsage: she goes to the opera
+to-night,” the man said to another man, as he took the young tea-rose.</p>
+
+<p>“What is the opera?” asked the mother-rose wearily of the butterfly.
+He did not know; but his cousin the death’s-head moth, asleep under a
+magnolia-leaf, looked down with a grim smile on his quaint face.</p>
+
+<p>“It is where everything dies in ten seconds,” he answered. “It is a
+circle of fire; many friends of mine have flown in, none ever returned:
+your daughter will shrivel up and perish miserably. One pays for
+glory.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span></p>
+
+<p>The rose-tree shivered through all her stalks; but she was still proud,
+and tried to think that all this was said only out of envy. What should
+an old death’s-head moth know, whose eyes were so weak that a farthing
+rushlight blinded them?</p>
+
+<p>So she lifted herself a little higher, and would not even see that the
+Banksiæ were nodding to her; and as for her old friend the blackbird,
+how vulgar he looked, bobbing up and down hunting worms and woodlice!
+could anything be more outrageously vulgar than that staring yellow
+beak of his? She twisted herself round not to see him, and felt quite
+annoyed that he went on and sang just the same, unconscious of, or
+indifferent to, her coldness.</p>
+
+<p>With each successive summer Rosa Damascena became more integrally and
+absolutely a Rosa Indica, and suffered in proportion to her fashion and
+fame.</p>
+
+<p>True, people came continually to look at her, and especially in
+May-time would cry aloud, “What a beautiful Niphétos!” But then she was
+bereaved of all her offspring, for, being of the race of Niphétos, they
+were precious, and one would go to die in an hour in a hot ball-room,
+and another to perish in a Sèvres vase, where the china indeed was
+exquisite but the water was foul, and others went to be suffocated in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>
+the vicious gases of what the mortals call an opera-box, and others
+were pressed to death behind hard diamonds in a woman’s bosom; in
+one way or another they each and all perish miserably. She herself
+also lost many of her once luxuriant leaves, and had a little scanty
+foliage, red-brown in summer, instead of the thick, dark-green clothing
+that she had worn when a rustic maiden. Not a day passed but the knife
+stabbed her; when the knife had nothing to take she was barren and
+chilly, for she had lost the happy power of looking beautiful all the
+year round, which once she had possessed.</p>
+
+<p>One day came when she was taken up out of the ground and borne into a
+glass house, placed in a large pot, and lifted up on to a pedestal,
+and left in a delicious atmosphere, with patrician plants all around
+her with long Latin names, and strange, rare beauties of their own.
+She bore bud after bud in this crystal temple, and became a very crown
+of blossom; and her spirit grew so elated, and her vanity so supreme,
+that she ceased to remember she had ever been a simple Rosa Damascena,
+except that she was always saying to herself, “How great I am! how
+great I am!” which she might have noticed that those born ladies,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>
+the Devoniensis and the Louise de Savoie, never did. But she noticed
+nothing except her own beauty, which she could see in a mirror that was
+let into the opposite wall of the greenhouse. Her blossoms were many
+and all quite perfect, and no knife touched them; and though to be sure
+she was still very scantily clothed so far as foliage went, yet she was
+all the more fashionable for that, so what did it matter?</p>
+
+<p>One day, when her beauty was at its fullest perfection, she heard
+all the flowers about her bending and whispering with rustling and
+murmuring, saying, “Who will be chosen? who will be chosen?”</p>
+
+<p>Chosen for what?</p>
+
+<p>They did not talk much to her, because she was but a new-comer and a
+parvenu, but she gathered from them in a little time that there was to
+be a ball for a marriage festivity at the house to which the greenhouse
+was attached. Each flower wondered if it would be chosen to go to it.
+The azaleas knew they would go, because they were in their pink or rose
+ball-dresses all ready; but no one else was sure. The rose-tree grew
+quite sick and faint with hope and fear. Unless she went, she felt that
+life was not worth the living. She had no idea what a ball might be,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span>
+but she knew that it was another form of greatness, when she was all
+ready, too, and so beautiful!</p>
+
+<p>The gardener came and sauntered down the glass house, glancing from one
+to another. The hearts of all beat high. The azaleas only never changed
+color: they were quite sure of themselves. Who could do without them in
+February?</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, take me! take me! take me!” prayed the rose-tree, in her foolish,
+longing, arrogant heart.</p>
+
+<p>Her wish was given her. The lord of their fates smiled when he came to
+where she stood.</p>
+
+<p>“This shall be for the place of honor,” he murmured, and he lifted her
+out of the large vase she lived in on to a trestle and summoned his
+boys to bear her away. The very azaleas themselves grew pale with envy.</p>
+
+<p>As for the rose-tree herself, she would not look at any one; she was
+carried through the old garden straight past the Banksiæ, but she would
+make them no sign; and as for the blackbird, she hoped a cat had eaten
+him! Had he not known her as Rosa Damascena?</p>
+
+<p>She was borne bodily, roots and all, carefully wrapped up in soft
+matting, and taken into the great house.</p>
+
+<p>It was a very great house, a very grand house, and there was to be a
+marvellous feast in it, and a prince and princess from over the seas
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span>
+were that night to honor the mistress of it by their presence. All
+this Rosa Indica had gathered from the chatter of the flowers, and
+when she came into the big palace she saw many signs of excitement and
+confusion: servants out of livery were running up against one another
+in their hurry-scurry; miles and miles, it seemed, of crimson carpeting
+were being unrolled all along the terrace and down the terrace steps,
+since by some peculiar but general impression royal personages are
+supposed not to like to walk upon anything else, though myself I think
+they must get quite sick of red carpet, seeing so very much of it
+spread for them wherever they go. To Rosa Indica, however, the bright
+scarlet carpeting looked very handsome, and seemed, indeed, a foretaste
+of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Soon she was carried quite inside the house, into an immense room with
+a beautiful dome-shaped ceiling, painted in fresco three centuries
+before, and fresh as though it had been painted yesterday. At the end
+of the room was a great chair, gilded and painted, too, three centuries
+before, and covered with velvet, gold-fringed and powdered with golden
+grasshoppers. “That common insect here!” thought Rosa, in surprise,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span>
+for she did not know that the chief of the house, long, long, long ago,
+when sleeping in the heat of noon in Palestine in the first crusade,
+had been awakened by a grasshopper lighting on his eyelids, and so had
+been aroused in time to put on his armor and do battle with a troop of
+attacking Saracen cavalry, and beat them; wherefore, in gratitude, he
+had taken the humble field-creature as his badge for evermore.</p>
+
+<p>They set the roots of Rosa Indica now into a vase—such a vase! the
+royal blue of Sèvres, if you please, and with border and scroll work
+and all kinds of wonders and glories painted on it and gilded on
+it, and standing four feet high if it stood one inch! I could never
+tell you the feelings of Rosa if I wrote a thousand pages. Her heart
+thrilled so with ecstasy that she almost dropped all her petals, only
+her vanity came to her aid, and helped her to control in a measure her
+emotions. The gardeners broke off a good deal of mould about her roots,
+and they muttered one to another something about her dying of it. But
+Rosa thought no more of that than a pretty lady does when her physician
+tells her she will die of tight lacing; not she! She was going to be
+put into that Sèvres vase.</p>
+
+<p>This was enough for her, as it is enough for the lady that she is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>
+going to be put into a hundred-guinea ball-gown.</p>
+
+<p>In she went. It was certainly a tight fit, as the gown often is, and
+Rosa felt nipped, strained, bruised, suffocated. But an old proverb has
+settled long ago that pride feels no pain, and perhaps the more foolish
+the pride the less is the pain that is felt—for the moment.</p>
+
+<p>They set her well into the vase, putting green moss over her roots, and
+then they stretched her branches out over a gilded trellis-work at the
+back of the vase. And very beautiful she looked; and she was at the
+head of the room, and a huge mirror down at the farther end opposite to
+her showed her own reflection. She was in paradise!</p>
+
+<p>“At last,” she thought to herself, “at last they have done me justice!”</p>
+
+<p>The azaleas were all crowded round underneath her, like so many
+kneeling courtiers, but they were not taken out of their pots; they
+were only shrouded in moss. They had no Sèvres vases. And they had
+always thought so much of themselves and given themselves such airs,
+for there is nothing so vain as an azalea—except, indeed, a camellia,
+which is the most conceited flower in the world, though, to do it
+justice, it is also the most industrious, for it is busy getting ready
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>
+its next winter buds whilst the summer is still hot and broad on the
+land, which is very wise and prudent in it and much to be commended.</p>
+
+<p>Well, there was Rosa Indica at the head of the room in the Sèvres vase,
+and very proud and triumphant she felt throned there, and the azaleas,
+of course, were whispering enviously underneath her, “Well, after all,
+she was only Rosa Damascena not so <i>very</i> long ago.”</p>
+
+<p>Yes, <i>they knew</i>! What a pity it was! They knew she had once
+been Rosa Damascena and never would wash it out of their minds—the
+tiresome, spiteful, malignant creatures!</p>
+
+<p>Even aloft in the vase, in all her glory, the rose could have shed
+tears of mortification, and was ready to cry, like Themistocles, “Can
+nobody give us oblivion?”</p>
+
+<p>Nobody could give that, for the azaleas, who were so irritated at
+being below her, were not at all likely to hold their tongues. But
+she had great consolations and triumphs, and began to believe that,
+let them say what they chose, she had never been a common garden-wall
+rose. The ladies of the house came in and praised her to the skies;
+the children ran up to her and clapped their hands and shouted for joy
+at her beauty; a wonderful big green bird came in and hopped before
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>
+her, cocked his head on one side, and said to her, “Pretty Poll! oh,
+<i>such</i> a pretty Poll!”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="i005" style="width: 800px;">
+<img src="images/i005.jpg" width="800" height="1247" alt="Two young girls, dressed in frilly dresses with ribbons and lace, stand close together, smiling and interacting with a young boy. The boy, dressed in a formal outfit with a jacket featuring decorative trim, appears to be offering something to the girls.">
+<figcaption class="caption">
+<p>“PRETTY POLL! OH, SUCH A PRETTY POLL!”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>“Even the birds adore me here!” she thought, not dreaming he was only
+talking of himself; for when you are as vain as was this poor dear
+Rosa, creation is pervaded with your own perfections, and even when
+other people say only “Poll!” you feel sure they are saying “You!” or
+they ought to be if they are not.</p>
+
+<p>So there she stood in her grand Sèvres pot, and she was ready to cry
+with the poet, “The world may end to-night!” Alas! it was not the
+world which was to end. Let me hasten to close this true heart-rending
+history.</p>
+
+<p>There was a great dinner as the sun began to set, and the mistress of
+the house came in on the arm of the great foreign prince; and what did
+the foreign prince do but look up at Rosa, straight up at her, and over
+the heads of the azaleas, and say to his hostess, “What a beautiful
+rose you have there! A Niphétos, is it not?”</p>
+
+<p>And her mistress, who had known her long as simple Rosa Damascena,
+answered, “Yes, sir; it is a Niphétos.”</p>
+
+<p>Oh to have lived for that hour! The silly thing thought it worth all
+her suffering from the gardener’s knife, all the loss of her robust
+health and delightful power of flowering in all four seasons. She was
+a Niphétos, really and truly a Niphétos! and not one syllable hinted
+as to her origin! She began to believe she had been <i>born</i> a
+tea-rose!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span></p>
+
+<p>The dinner was long and gorgeous; the guests were dazzling in jewels
+and in decorations; the table was loaded with old plate and rare china;
+the prince made a speech and used her as a simile of love and joy and
+purity and peace. The rose felt giddy with triumph and with the fumes
+of the wines around her. Her vase was of purple and gold, and all the
+voices round her said, “Oh, the beautiful rose!” No one noticed the
+azaleas. How she wished that the blackbird could see for a minute, if
+the cat would gobble him up the next!</p>
+
+<p>The day sped on; the châtelaine and her guests went away; the table was
+rearranged; the rose-tree was left in its place of honor; the lights
+were lit; there was the sound of music near at hand; they were dancing
+in other chambers.</p>
+
+<p>Above her hung a chandelier—a circle of innumerable little flames and
+drops that looked like dew or diamonds. She thought it was the sun come
+very close. After it had been there a little while it grew very hot,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>
+and its rays hurt her.</p>
+
+<p>“Can you not go a little farther away, O Sun?” she said to it. It was
+flattered at being taken for the sun, but answered her, “I am fixed in
+my place. Do you not understand astronomy?”</p>
+
+<p>She did not know what astronomy was, so was silent, and the heat hurt
+her. Still, she was in the place of honor: so she was happy.</p>
+
+<p>People came and went; but nobody noticed her. They ate and drank, they
+laughed and made love, and then went away to dance again, and the music
+went on all night long, and all night long the heat of the chandelier
+poured down on her.</p>
+
+<p>“I am in the place of honor,” she said to herself a thousand times in
+each hour.</p>
+
+<p>But the heat scorched her, and the fumes of the wines made her faint.
+She thought of the sweet fresh air of the old garden where the Banksiæ
+were. The garden was quite near, but the windows were closed, and there
+were the walls now between her and it. She was in the place of honor.
+But she grew sick and waxed faint as the burning rays of the artificial
+light shining above her seemed to pierce through and through her like
+lances of steel. The night seemed very long. She was tired.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span></p>
+
+<p>She was erect there on her Sèvres throne, with the light thrilling and
+throbbing upon her in every point. But she thought of the sweet, dark,
+fresh nights in the old home where the blackbird had slept, and she
+longed for them.</p>
+
+<p>The dancers came and went, the music thrummed and screamed, the
+laughter was both near and far; the rose-tree was amidst it all. Yet
+she felt alone—all alone! as travellers may feel in a desert. Hour
+succeeded hour; the night wore on apace; the dancers ceased to come;
+the music ceased, too; the light still burned down upon her, and the
+scorching fever of it consumed her like fire.</p>
+
+<p>Then there came silence—entire silence. Servants came round and put
+out all the lights—hundreds and hundreds of lights—quickly one by
+one. Other servants went to the windows and threw them wide open to
+let out the fumes of wine. Without, the night was changing into the
+gray that tells of earliest dawn. But it was a bitter frost; the grass
+was white with it; the air was ice. In the great darkness that had now
+fallen on all the scene this deadly cold came around the rose-tree and
+wrapped her in it as in a shroud.</p>
+
+<p>She shivered from head to foot.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span></p>
+
+<p>The true glacial coldness crept into the hot banqueting-chamber, and
+moved round it in white, misty circles, like steam, like ghosts of the
+gay guests that had gone. All was dark and chill—dark and chill as any
+grave!</p>
+
+<p>What worth was the place of honor now?</p>
+
+<p>Was this the place of honor?</p>
+
+<p>The rose-tree swooned and drooped! A servant’s rough hand shook down
+its worn beauty into a heap of fallen leaves. When they carried her
+out dead in the morning, the little Banksia-buds, safe hidden from the
+frost within their stems, waiting to come forth when the summer should
+come, murmured to one another:</p>
+
+<p>“She had her wish; she was great. This way the gods grant foolish
+prayers, and punish discontent!”</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="transnote spa1">
+<p class="nindc"><b>TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES</b></p>
+
+
+<p>Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced
+quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
+otherwise left unbalanced.</p>
+
+<p>Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
+predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
+were not changed.</p>
+</div></div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75655 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/75655-h/images/cover.jpg b/75655-h/images/cover.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f176ad7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75655-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/75655-h/images/frontispiece.jpg b/75655-h/images/frontispiece.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e0a9761
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75655-h/images/frontispiece.jpg
diff --git a/75655-h/images/i001.jpg b/75655-h/images/i001.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..28d6829
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75655-h/images/i001.jpg
diff --git a/75655-h/images/i002.jpg b/75655-h/images/i002.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3128226
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75655-h/images/i002.jpg
diff --git a/75655-h/images/i003.jpg b/75655-h/images/i003.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bff16db
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75655-h/images/i003.jpg
diff --git a/75655-h/images/i004.jpg b/75655-h/images/i004.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1084598
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75655-h/images/i004.jpg
diff --git a/75655-h/images/i005.jpg b/75655-h/images/i005.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5310445
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75655-h/images/i005.jpg
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b5dba15
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this book outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..479be22
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+book #75655 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75655)