had already reached Miss Yonge, and should therefore have been
more interested in prolific curates and harrowing deathbeds.

Nothwithstanding, we all felt indignant, betrayed, and sullen to
the verge of mutiny. Though for long we had affected to despise
them, these toys, yet they had grown up with us, shared our joys
and our sorrows, seen us at our worst, and become part of the
accepted scheme of existence. As we gazed at untenanted shelves
and empty, hatefully tidy corners, perhaps for the first time for
long we began to do them a tardy justice.

There was old Leotard, for instance. Somehow he had come to be
sadly neglected of late years--and yet how exactly he always
responded to certain moods! He was an acrobat, this Leotard, who
lived in a glass-fronted box. His loosejointed limbs were
cardboard, cardboard his slender trunk; and his hands eternally
grasped the bar of a trapeze. You turned the box round swiftly
five or six times; the wonderful unsolved machinery worked, and
Leotard swung and leapt, backwards, forwards, now astride the
bar, now flying free; iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, unceasingly
novel in his invention of new, unguessable attitudes; while
above, below, and around him, a richly-dressed audience, painted
in skilful perspective of stalls, boxes, dress-circle, and
gallery, watched the thrilling performance with a stolidity which
seemed to mark them out as made in Germany. Hardly versatile
enough, perhaps, this Leotard; unsympathetic, not a companion for
all hours; nor would you have chosen him to take to bed with you.

And yet, within his own limits, how fresh, how engrossing, how
resourceful and inventive! Well, he was gone, it seemed--