old egg-box which the mother had begged from a shop, a little
feeble, wasted, wan, sick child. With his little wasted face, and
his little hot, worn hands folded over his breast, and his little
bright, attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I have seen him for
several years, look in steadily at us. There he lay in his little
frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the little body
from which he was slowly parting--there he lay, quite quiet, quite
patient, saying never a word. He seldom cried, the mother said; he
seldom complained; "he lay there, seemin' to woonder what it was a'
aboot." God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had
his reasons for wondering--reasons for wondering how it could
possibly come to be that he lay there, left alone, feeble and full
of pain, when he ought to have been as bright and as brisk as the
birds that never got near him--reasons for wondering how he came to
be left there, a little decrepid old man pining to death, quite a
thing of course, as if there were no crowds of healthy and happy
children playing on the grass under the summer's sun within a
stone's throw of him, as if there were no bright, moving sea on the
other side of the great hill overhanging the city; as if there were
no great clouds rushing over it; as if there were no life, and
movement, and vigour anywhere in the world--nothing but stoppage
and decay. There he lay looking at us, saying, in his silence,
more pathetically than I have ever heard anything said by any
orator in my life, "Will you please to tell me what this means,
strange man? and if you can give me any good reason why I should be
so soon, so far advanced on my way to Him who said that children
were to come into His presence and were not to be forbidden, but
who scarcely meant, I think, that they should come by this hard
road by which I am travelling; pray give that reason to me, for I
seek it very earnestly and wonder about it very much;" and to my