as to bed. Yet as I entered the room I saw that one of the little
tables in the corner was in reality occupied by a very small and very
extraordinary child. Seated in a high chair, attended by a dreamily
abstracted nurse on one side, an utterly perfunctory negro waiter on the
other, and an incongruous assortment of disregarded viands before
him, he was taking--or, rather, declining--his solitary breakfast. He
appeared to be a pale, frail, but rather pretty boy, with a singularly
pathetic combination of infant delicacy of outline and maturity of
expression. His heavily fringed eyes expressed an already weary and
discontented intelligence, and his willful, resolute little mouth was, I
fancied, marked with lines of pain at either corner. He struck me as not
only being physically dyspeptic, but as morally loathing his attendants
and surroundings.

My entrance did not disturb the waiter, with whom I had no financial
relations; he simply concealed an exaggerated yawn professionally behind
his napkin until my own servitor should appear. The nurse slightly awoke
from her abstraction, shoved the child mechanically,--as if starting
up some clogged machinery,--said, "Eat your breakfast, Johnnyboy," and
subsided into her dream. I think the child had at first some faint hope
of me, and when my waiter appeared with my breakfast he betrayed some
interest in my selection, with a view of possible later appropriation,
but, as my repast was simple, that hope died out of his infant mind.
Then there was a silence, broken at last by the languid voice of the
nurse:--

"Try some milk then--nice milk."

"No! No mik! Mik makes me sick--mik does!"