oor little chap was
standing in the middle of it with dazed eyes, like a hare's, when the
'bus pulled up. His eyelids were pink and swollen; but he wasn't crying,
though he wanted to. Instead, he gave a gulp as he came on board with
stick and bundle, and tried to look brave as a lion.

"I'd have given worlds to speak to him, but I couldn't. On my word, sir,
I should have cried. It wasn't so much the little chap's look. But
to the knot of his bundle there was tied a bunch of cottage
flowers,--sweet-williams, boy's-love, and a rose or two,--and the sight
and smell of them in that stuffy omnibus were like tears on thirsty
eyelids. It's the young that I pity, sir. For Gabriel, in his bed up at
Shepherd's Bush, there's no more to be said, as far as I can see; and
as for me, I'm the oldest clerk in Tweedy's, which is very satisfactory.
It's the young faces, set toward the road along which we have travelled,
that trouble me. Sometimes, sir, I lie awake in my lodgings and listen,
and the whole of this London seems filled with the sound of children's
feet running, and I can sob aloud. You may say that it is only
selfishness, and what I really pity is my own boyhood. I dare say you're
right. It's certain that, as I kept glancing at the boy and his sea
kit and his bunch of flowers, my mind went back to the January morning,
sixty-five years back, when the coach took me off for the first time
from the village where I was born to a London charity-school. I was
worse off than the boy in the omnibus, for I had just lost father and
mother. Yet it was the sticks and stones and flower-beds that I mostly
thought of. I went round and said good-bye to the lilacs, and told them
to be in flower by the time I came back. I said to the rose-bush, 'You
must be as high as my window next May; you know you only missed it by
three inches last summer.' Then I went to the cow-house, and kissed the
cows, one by one. They were to be sold by auction the very next week,
but I guessed nothing of it, and ordered them not to forget me. And
last I looked at the swallows' nests under the thatch,--the last year's
nests,--and told myself that they would be filled again when I returned.
I remembered this, and how I stretched out my hands to the place from
the coach-top; and how at Reading, where we stopped, I spent the two
shillings that I possessed in a cocoanut and a bright clasp-knife;
and how, when I opened it, the nut was sour; and how I cried myself to
sleep,