calling them to come and be Anglicized. And they came in a great
straggling procession recruited from every lane and by-way, big children
and little children, boys in blackening corduroy, and girls in
washed-out cotton; tidy children and ragged children; children in great
shapeless boots gaping at the toes; sickly children, and sturdy
children, and diseased children; bright-eyed children and hollow-eyed
children; quaint sallow foreign-looking children, and fresh-colored
English-looking children; with great pumpkin heads, with oval heads,
with pear-shaped heads; with old men's faces, with cherubs' faces, with
monkeys' faces; cold and famished children, and warm and well-fed
children; children conning their lessons and children romping
carelessly; the demure and the anaemic; the boisterous and the
blackguardly, the insolent, the idiotic, the vicious, the intelligent,
the exemplary, the dull--spawn of all countries--all hastening at the
inexorable clang of the big school-bell to be ground in the same great,
blind, inexorable Governmental machine. Here, too, was a miniature fair,
the path being lined by itinerant temptations. There was brisk traffic
in toffy, and gray peas and monkey-nuts, and the crowd was swollen by
anxious parents seeing tiny or truant offspring safe within the
school-gates. The women were bare-headed or be-shawled, with infants at
their breasts and little ones toddling at their sides, the men were
greasy, and musty, and squalid. Here a bright earnest little girl held
her vagrant big brother by the hand, not to let go till she had seen him
in the bosom of his class-mates. There a sullen wild-eyed mite in
petticoats was being dragged along, screaming, towards distasteful
durance. It was a drab picture--the bleak, leaden sky above, the sloppy,
miry stones below, the frowsy mothers and fathers, the motley children.

"Monkey-nuts! Monkey-nuts!" croaked a wizened old woman.