e
her veritable children. Whereas he, Paul-it was as plain as daylight.
Somewhere far away in the great world, an august and griefstricken
pair, at that very moment, were mourning the loss of their only son.
There they were, in their marble palace, surrounded by flunkeys all
crimson and gold (men servants were always "gorgeously apparelled
flunkeys" in Paul's books), sitting at a table loaded with pineapples
on golden dishes, and eating out their hearts with longing. He could
hear their talk.

"If only our beloved son were with us," said the princess, wiping away
a tear.

"We must be patient, my sweet Highness," replied the prince, with lofty
resignation stamped on his noble brow. "Let us trust to Heaven to
remove the cankerworm that is gnawing our vitals."

Paul felt very sorry for them, and he, too, wiped away a tear.

For many years he remembered that day. He was alone in his brickfield
on a gusty March morning-the Easter holidays had released him from
school-squatting by his hole under the lee of a mass of earth and
rubbish. It was a mean expanse, blackened by soot and defiled by
refuse. Here and there bramble and stunted gorse struggled for an
existence; but the flora mainly consisted in bits of old boots and foul
raiment protruding grotesquely from the soil, half-buried cans, rusty
bits of iron, and broken bottles. On one side the backs of grimy little
houses, their yards full of fluttering drab underwear' marked the edge
of the hopeless town which rose above them in forbidding buildings,
belching chimney shafts and the spikes of a couple of spires. On the
other sides it was bounded by the brick walls of factories, the
municipal gasworks and the approach to the railway station, indicated
by signal-posts standing out against the sky like gallows, and a
tram-line bordered by a row of skeleton cottages. Golgotha was a grim
garden compared with Paul's brickfield. Sometimes the children of the
town scuttled about it like dingy little rabbits. But more often it was
a desolate solitude. Perhaps all but the lowest of the parents of
Bludston had put the place out of bounds, as gipsies and other dwellers
in vans were allowed to camp there. It also bore an evil name because a
night murder or two had been committed in its murky seclusion. Paul
knew the exact spot, an ugly cavity toward the gasworks end, where a
woman had been "done in," and even he, lord of the brickfield,
preferred to remain at a purifying distance. But