opic exactness.

She lived in her old house alone save for the presence of one child, a
boy of six or seven years--a quiet, grave-eyed little fellow, who played
all by himself hour after hour with two little wooden soldiers and an
empty spool. He seldom went out of the house; he did not seem to care
for the sunshine or the open air as other children care, but gravely
amused himself in-doors in his own quiet way. He did not make his wooden
soldiers talk or demolish each other triumphantly, according to the
manner of boys; but he marshaled them to and fro with slow
consideration, and the only sound was the click of their little muskets
as he moved them about. He seemed never to speak of his own accord; he
was strangely silent always. I used to wonder if the two ever talked
together playfully as mother and child should talk; and one day,
emboldened by a welcome, not warmer, for it was never warm, but not
quite so cold perhaps, I said:

"Your little son is very quiet, madam."

"He is not my son."

"Ah!" I replied, somewhat disconcerted. "He is a pretty child; what is
his name?"

"His name is John."

The child heard us in his barren corner, but did not look up or speak;
he made his two soldiers advance solemnly upon the spool in silence,
with a flank movement. I have called the corner barren, because it
seemed doubly so when the boy sat there. The poorest place generally
puts on something of a homelike air when a little child is in it; but
the two bare walls and angle of bare floor remained hopelessly empty and
desolate. The room was large, but there was nothing in it save the two
wooden chairs and a table; there was no womanly attempt at a rag-carpet,
curtains for the windows, or newspaper pictures for the walls--none of
those little contrivances for comfort with which women generally adorn
even the most miserable abiding-places, showing a kind of courage which
is often pathetic in its hopefulness. Here, however, there was nothing.
A back-room held a few dishes, some boxes and barrels, and showed on its
cavernous hearth the ashes of a recent fire. "I suppose they sleep in a
third bare room somewhere, with their two beds, no doubt, standing all
alone in the center of the chamber; for it would be too human, of
course, to put them up snugly against the wall, as anybody else would
do," I said to myself.

In time I succeeded in building up a sort of friendship with this
solitary woman of the waste, and in time she told