so because of the wonderful lamp they called him Aladdin.
And that rendered his first school-days wretched and had nothing to do
with the rest of his life, after the everlasting fashion of wonderful
names. Aladdin's mother went out of the world in the very natural act
of ushering his young brother into it, and he remembered her as a thin
person who was not strictly honorable (for, having betrayed him with
a kiss, she punished him for smoking) and had a headache. So there was
nobody to miss Aladdin or to waste the valuable night in looking for
him.

About this time Margaret began to cry and Aladdin to comfort her, and
they stumbled about in the woods trying to find--anything. After awhile
they happened into a grassy glade between two steep rocks, and there
agreeing to rest, scrunched into a depression of the rock on the right.
And Margaret, her nose very red, her hat at an angle, and her head on
Aladdin's shoulder, sobbed herself to sleep. And then, because being
trusted is next to being God, and the most moving and gentlest condition
possible, Aladdin, for the first time, felt the full measure of his
crime in leading Margaret from the straight way home, and he pressed her
close to him and stroked her draggled hair with his cold little hands
and cried. Whenever she moved in sleep, his heart went out to her, and
before the night was old he loved her forever.

Sleep did not come to Aladdin, who had suddenly become a father and a
mother and a nurse and a brother and a lover and a man who must not be
afraid. His coat was wrapped about Margaret, and his arms were wrapped
about his coat, and the body of him shivered against the damp, cold
shirt, which would come open in front because there was a button gone.
The fog came in thicker and colder, and night with her strange noises
moved slower and slower. There was an old loon out on the river, who
would suddenly throw back his head and laugh for no reason at all. And
once a great strange bird went rushing past, squeaking like a mouse; and
once two bright eyes came, flashing out of the night and swung this way
and that like signal-lanterns and disappeared. Aladdin gave himself up
for lost and would have screamed if he had been alone.

Presently his throat began to tickle, then the base of his nose, then
the bridge thereof, and then he felt for a handkerchief and found none.
For a little while he maintained the proprieties by a gentle sniffling,
finally by one great agonized snuf