His nurses called him "deep," "although for a deep child I must say he's
'appy."

Both his depth and his happiness were at Lucy's complete disposal. The
people who saw him in the Square called him "a jolly little boy," and,
indeed, his appearance of gravity was undermined by the curl of his
upper lip and a dimple in the middle of his left cheek, so that he
seemed to be always at the crisis of a prolonged chuckle. One very
rarely heard him laugh out loud, and his sturdy, rather fat body was
carried rather gravely, and he walked contemplatively as though he were
thinking something out. He would look at you, too, very earnestly when
you spoke to him, and would wait a little before he answered you, and
then would speak slowly as though he were choosing his words with care.
And yet he was, in spite of these things, really a "jolly little boy."
His "jolliness" was there in point of view, in the astounding interest
he found in anything and everything, in his refusal to be upset by any
sort of thing whatever.

But his really unusual quality was his mixture of stolid English
matter-of-fact with an absolutely unbridled imagination. He would
pursue, day by day, week after week, games, invented games of his own,
that owed nothing, either for their inception or their execution, to any
one else. They had their origin for the most part in stray sentences
that he had overheard from his elders, but they also arose from his own
private and personal experiences--experiences which were as real to him
as going to the dentist or going to the pantomime were to his brothers
and sisters. There was, for instance, a gentleman of whom he always
spoke of as Mr. Jack. This friend no one had ever seen, but Bim quoted
him frequently. He did not, apparently, see him very often now, but at