ining the path, and out
into the road. A late rose leaning over the garden fence gave up her
leaves in a pink shower as he passed, and at the same instant all the
glass in a window of the house opposite fell out with a smash. These
events seemed perfectly natural to Aladdin, but when people, talking at
the tops of their voices and gesticulating, began to run out of houses
and make down the hill toward the town, he remembered that, just as the
rose-leaves fell and just as the glass came out of the window-frame,
he had been conscious of a distant thudding boom, and a jarring of the
ground under his feet. So he joined in the stream of his neighbors, and
ran with them down the hill to see what had happened.

Aladdin remembered little of that breathless run, and one thing only
stood ever afterward vivid among his recollections. All the people were
headed eagerly in one direction, but at the corner of the street in
which Aladdin lived, an awkish, half-grown girl, her face contorted
with terror, struggled against the tugging of two younger companions and
screamed in a terrible voice:

"I don't wahnt to go! I don't wahnt to go!"

But they dragged her along. That girl had no father, and her mother
walked the streets. She would never have any beauty nor any grace; she
was dirt of the dirt, dirty, but she had a heart of mercy and could not
bear to look upon suffering.

"I don't wahnt to go! I don't wahnt to go!" and now the scream was a
shudder.

Aladdin's street was crowded to suffocation, and the front of the house
where Aladdin lived was blown out, and men with grave faces were going
about among the ruins looking for what was left of Aladdin's father.

A much littler boy than Aladdin stood in the yard of the house. In his
arms folded high he clutched a yellow cat, who licked his cheek with her
rough tongue. The littler boy kept crying, "'Laddin, 'Laddin!"

Aladdin took the little boy and the yellow cat all into one embrace, and
people turned away their heads.

VII

In the ensuing two days Aladdin matured enormously, for though a kind
neighbor took him in, together with his brother Jack and the yellow cat,
he had suffered many things and already sniffed the wolf at the door.
The kind neighbor was a widow lady, whose husband, having been a master
carpenter of retentive habits, had left her independently rich. She
owned the white-and-green house in which she lived, the plot of ground,
including a small front and