ugh for long we had affected to despise them, these
toys, yet they had grown up with us, shared our joys and our sorrows,
seen us at our worst, and become part of the accepted scheme of
existence. As we gazed at untenanted shelves and empty, hatefully tidy
corners, perhaps for the first time for long we began to do them a tardy
justice.

There was old Leotard, for instance. Somehow he had come to be sadly
neglected of late years--and yet how exactly he always responded
to certain moods! He was an acrobat, this Leotard, who lived in a
glass-fronted box. His loose-jointed limbs were cardboard, cardboard his
slender trunk; and his hands eternally grasped the bar of a trapeze. You
turned the box round swiftly five or six times; the wonderful unsolved
machinery worked, and Leotard swung and leapt, backwards, forwards,
now astride the bar, now flying free; iron-jointed, supple-sinewed,
unceasingly novel in his invention of new, unguessable attitudes; while
above, below, and around him, a richly-dressed audience, painted in
skilful perspective of stalls, boxes, dress-circle, and gallery, watched
the thrilling performance with a stolidity which seemed to mark them
out as made in Germany. Hardly versatile enough, perhaps, this Leotard;
unsympathetic, not a companion for all hours; nor would you have chosen
him to take to bed with you. And yet, within his own limits, how fresh,
how engrossing, how resourceful and inventive! Well, he was gone, it
seemed--merely gone. Never specially cherished while he tarried with
us, he had yet contrived to build himself a particular niche of his own.
Sunrise and sunset, and the dinner-bell, and the sudden rainbow, and
lessons, and Leotard, and the moon through the nursery windows--they
were all part of the great order of things, and the displacement of any
one item seemed to disorganize the whole machinery. The immediate point
was, not that the world would continue to go round as of old, but that
Leotard wouldn't.

Yonder corner, now swept and garnished, had been the stall wherein the
spotty horse, at the close of each laborious day, was accustomed to doze
peacefully the long night through. In days of old each of us in turn had
been jerked thrillingly round the room on his precarious back, had dug
our heels into his unyielding sides, and had scratched our hands on the
tin tacks that secured his mane to his stiffly-curving neck. Later, with
increasing stature, we came to overlook his merits as a