guards set, to give notice of the approach of the children's
joy-destroying Siva--otherwise the policeman--they played ball. Here
"cat" and "one old cat" render bearable many a wilting hour for the
little urchins. Here "Sally in our Alley" and "Skip-rope" made the
little girls forget that the temperature was far above blood-heat. Here
of an evening, Peter smoked and watched them.

At first he was an object of suspicion, and the sport visibly ceased
when he put in an appearance. But he simply sat on one of the benches
and puffed his pipe, and after a few evenings they lost all fear of him,
and went on as if he were not there. In time, an intercourse sprang up
between them. One evening Peter appeared with a stick of wood, and as he
smoked, he whittled at it with a _real_ jack-knife! He was scrutinized
by the keen-eyed youngsters with interest at once, and before he had
whittled long, he had fifty children sitting in the shape of a
semicircle on the stone pavement, watching his doings with almost
breathless Interest. When the result of his work actually developed into
a "cat" of marvellous form and finish, a sigh of intense joy passed
through the boy part of his audience. When the "cat" was passed over to
their mercies, words could not be found to express their emotions.
Another evening, the old clothes-line that served for a jump-rope, after
having bravely rubbed against the pavement many thousand times in its
endeavor to lighten the joyless life of the little pack, finally
succumbed, worn through the centre and quite beyond hope of further
knotting. Then Peter rose, and going to one of the little shops that
supplied the district, soon returned with a _real_ jump-rope, with
_wooden handles!_ So from time to time, _real_ tops, _real_ dolls,
_real_ marbles and various other _real_, if cheap, things, hitherto only
enjoyed in dreams, or at most through home-made attempts, found their
way into the angle, and were distributed among the little imps. They