would have known--and often had the subject been debated--that
Hannibal St. John was human.

Aladdin stood for a while upon the lofty pillared portico of
the senator's house, and with a mist in his eyes looked away
and away to where the cause of all his troubles flowed like a
ribbon of silver through the bright-colored land. Grown men,
having, in their whole lives, suffered less than Aladdin was
at that moment suffering, have considered themselves
heartbroken. The little boy shivered and toiled down the
steps, between the tall box hedges lining the path, and out
into the road. A late rose leaning over the garden fence gave
up her leaves in a pink shower as he passed, and at the same
instant all the glass in a window of the house opposite fell
out with a smash. These events seemed perfectly natural to
Aladdin, but when people, talking at the tops of their voices
and gesticulating, began to run out of houses and make down
the hill toward the town, he remembered that, just as the
rose-leaves fell and just as the glass came out of the
window-frame, he had been conscious of a distant thudding
boom, and a jarring of the ground under his feet. So he
joined in the stream of his neighbors, and ran with them
down the hill to see what had happened.

Aladdin remembered little of that breathless run, and one
thing only stood ever afterward vivid among his recollections.
All the people were headed eagerly in one direction, but at
the corner of the street in which Aladdin lived, an awkish,
half-grown girl, her face contorted with terror, struggled
against the tugging of two younger companions and screamed in