nce coming too
early constructs, sometimes, in the obscure depths of a child's mind,
some dangerous balance--we know not what--in which the poor little soul
weighs God.

Feeling himself innocent, he yielded. There was no complaint--the
irreproachable does not reproach.

His rough expulsion drew from him no sign; he suffered a sort of
internal stiffening. The child did not bow under this sudden blow of
fate, which seemed to put an end to his existence ere it had well begun;
he received the thunderstroke standing.

It would have been evident to any one who could have seen his
astonishment unmixed with dejection, that in the group which abandoned
him there was nothing which loved him, nothing which he loved.

Brooding, he forgot the cold. Suddenly the wave wetted his feet--the
tide was flowing; a gust passed through his hair--the north wind was
rising. He shivered. There came over him, from head to foot, the shudder
of awakening.

He cast his eyes about him.

He was alone.

Up to this day there had never existed for him any other men than those
who were now in the hooker. Those men had just stolen away.

Let us add what seems a strange thing to state. Those men, the only
ones he knew, were unknown to him.

He could not have said who they were. His childhood had been passed
among them, without his having the consciousness of being of them. He
was in juxtaposition to them, nothing more.

He had just been--forgotten--by them.

He had no money about him, no shoes to his feet, scarcely a garment to
his body, not even a piece of bread in his pocket.

It was winter--it was night. It would be necessary to walk several
leagues before a human habitation could be reached.

He did not know where he was.

He knew nothing, unless it was that those who had come with him to the
brink of the sea had gone away without him.

He felt himself put outside the pale of life.

He felt that man failed him.

He was ten years old.

The child was in a desert, between depths where he saw the night rising
and depths where he heard the waves murmur.

He stretched his little thin arms and yawned.

Then suddenly, as one who makes up his mind, bold, and throwing off his
numbness--with the agility of a squirrel, or perhaps of an acrobat--he
turned his back on the creek, and set himself to climb up the cliff. He
escaladed the path, left it, returned to it, quick and venturous. He was
hurrying landward, just as though he had a destin