e was aware of a small,
thin voice addressing him.

"Oh, please won't you carry me a bit? I'm so tired," said the
voice. He turned in some trepidation to look for the speaker, and
found her to be a sickly, undergrown little girl of ten or
thereabouts, with large, pleading, grey eyes, very shabbily
dressed, and a little lame. He had remarked her several times in
the course of the day, not for any beauty or grace about her, for
the poor child had none, but for her transparent confidence and
trustfulness. After dinner, as they had been all sitting on the
grass under the shade of a great elm to hear Grey read a story,
and Tom had been sitting a little apart from the rest with his
back against the trunk, she had come up and sat quietly down by
him, leaning on his knee. Then he had seen her go up and take the
hand of the lady who had entertained them, and walk along by her,
talking without the least shyness. Soon afterwards she had
squeezed into the swing by the side of the beautifully-dressed
little daughter of the same lady, who, after looking for a minute
at her shabby little sister with large round eyes, had jumped out
and run off to her mother, evidently in a state of childish
bewilderment as to whether it was not wicked for a child to wear
such dirty old clothes.

Tom had chuckled to himself as he saw Cinderella settling herself
comfortably in the swing in the place of the ousted princess, and
had taken a fancy to the child, speculating to himself as to how
she could have been brought up, to be so utterly unconscious of
differences of rank and dress. "She seems really to treat her
fellow-creatures as if she had been studying the _Sartor
Resartus_," he thought. "She was cut down through all
clothes-philosophy without knowing it. I wonder, if she had a
chance, whether she would go and sit down in the Queen's lap?"

He did not at the time anticipate that she would put his own
clothes-philosophy to so severe a test before the day was over.
The child had been as merry and active as any of the rest during
the earlier part of the day; but now, as he looked down in answer
to her reiterated plea, "Won't you carry me a bit? I'm so
tired!", he saw that she could scarcely drag one foot after
another.

What was to be done? He was already keenly alive to the
discomfort of walking across Hyde Park in a procession of ragged
children, with such a figure of fun as Grey at their head,
looking, in his long, rusty, straight-cut blac