freedom, gazed
at the enemy of all creation.

But the look he received in return was so kindly, and withal so
peculiar and so unlike any that he had ever seen before, that his
instinct to fly yielded to his curiosity to discover. Romulus did not
know that the great house in the grove was an idiot-asylum, nor that
the lad with the strange but kindly expression was one of the inmates.
He knew only that kindness was there. The look which he saw was not the
hard and cruel one of the menagerie-keeper, nor the empty, idle,
curious one of the spectators, countenancing by their presence and
supporting with their money the infamous and exclusively human practice
of capturing wild animals and keeping them all their lives in the
torture of captivity. So deeply interested was Romulus in what he saw
that he forgot his fear and cocked his head on one side and made a
queer grimace; and his motions and attitude were so comical that Moses,
the idiot, grinned at him through the pickets. But the grin was not the
only manifestation of pleasure that Moses gave. A peculiar vermicular
movement, beginning at his feet and ending at his head, was the
precursor of a slow, vacant guffaw that expressed the most intense
delight of which he was capable. Moses never before had seen so queer a
creature as this little brown man all covered with hair; he never
before had seen even a monkey, that common joy of ordinary childhood,
and remoter from resemblance to human kind than was Romulus. Moses was
nineteen; but, although his voice was childlike no longer and his face
was covered with unsightly short hair, and he was large and strong,
running mostly to legs and arms, he was simple and innocent. His
clothes were much too small, and a thick growth of wild hair topped his
poll, otherwise innocent of covering.

Thus gazed these two strange beings at each other, held by sympathy and
curiosity. Neither had the power of speech, and hence neither could lie
to the other. Was it instinct which made Romulus believe that of all
the bipedal devils which infested the face of the earth there was one
of so gentle spirit that it could love him? And was it by instinct that
Romulus, ignorant as he was of the larger ways of the world, discovered
that his own mind was the firmer and cleverer of the two? And, feeling
the hitherto unimaginable sweetness of freedom, did there come to him a
knowledge that this fellow-being was a prisoner, as he himself had
been, and longed for