to live at Ealing. The new wife gave her
children the best of everything, and Harry many a whipping, he knew not
why. Besides blows, he got ill names from her, which need not be set
down here, for the sake of old Mr. Pastoureau, who was still kind
sometimes. The unhappiness of those days is long forgiven, though they
cast a shade of melancholy over the child's youth, which will accompany
him, no doubt, to the end of his days: as those tender twigs are bent
the trees grow afterward; and he, at least, who has suffered as a child,
and is not quite perverted in that early school of unhappiness, learns
to be gentle and long-suffering with little children.

Harry was very glad when a gentleman dressed in black, on horseback,
with a mounted servant behind him, came to fetch him away from Ealing.
The noverca, or unjust stepmother, who had neglected him for her own
two children, gave him supper enough the night before he went away, and
plenty in the morning. She did not beat him once, and told the children
to keep their hands off him. One was a girl, and Harry never could bear
to strike a girl; and the other was a boy, whom he could easily have
beat, but he always cried out, when Mrs. Pastoureau came sailing to the
rescue with arms like a flail. She only washed Harry's face the day he
went away; nor ever so much as once boxed his ears. She whimpered rather
when the gentleman in black came for the boy; and old Mr. Pastoureau, as
he gave the child his blessing, scowled over his shoulder at the strange
gentleman, and grumbled out something about Babylon and the scarlet
lady. He was grown quite old, like a child almost. Mrs. Pastoureau
used to wipe his nose as she did to the children. She was a great, big,
handsome young woman; but, though she pretended to cry, Harry thought
'twas only a sham, and sprung quite delighted upon the horse upon which
the lackey helped him.

He was a Frenchman; his name was Blaise. The child could talk to him in
his own language perfectly well: he knew it better than English indeed,
having lived hitherto chiefly among French people: and being called the
Little Frenchman by other boys on Ealing Green. He soon learnt to speak
English perfectly, and to forget some of his French: children forget
easily. Some earlier and fainter recollections the child had of a
different country; and a town with tall white houses: and a ship. But
these were quite indistinct in the boy's mind, as indeed the memory of
Ealing so