The Fortunate Youth

, to go near the Sunday school again, and, lest he should defy authority, he was told off on Sunday afternoons to mind the baby,

school, a man of brawn and zeal, to see what muscular Christianity could accomplish. But muscular Christianity, losing its head, came off with a black eye. After that the Buttons were left alone, and no friendly hand drew Paul within the gates of his Sunday Paradise. He thought of it with aching wistfulness. The only thing that the superintende

hepherd had left for Scotland the morning after the school treat; people don't come to Bludston for long and happy holidays. So Paul had to feed his ardent little soul on memories. That she had n

he could roam the streets at pleasure. Why should he not sell newspapers-in a quarter of the town, be it understood, remote from both factory and Budge Street? He sold newspapers for three weeks before he was found out. Then he was chastised and forced to go on selling newspapers with no profit to himself, for his person was rigorously searched and coppers confiscated as soon as he came home. But during the three weeks' traffic on his own account he had amassed a sufficient hoard of pennies for the purchase of several books in gaudy paper covers exposed for sale in the little stationer's shop round the corner. Soon he discovered that if he could batik a copper or two on his way home his mother would be none the wiser. The stationer became his banker, and when the amount of the deposit equaled the price of a book, Paul withdrew his

d such a way with them! He felt a curious pride in being able to enter into all their haughty emotions. Then, one day, he began a story about a poor little outcast boy in a slum. At first he did not care for it. His soaring spirit disdained boys in slums. It had its being on higher planes. But he read on, and, reading on, grew interested, until inter

t superiority was gall to their base natures. Yes, he had got to the heart of the mystery. Mrs. Button was not his mother. For reasons unknown he had been kidnapped. Aware of his high lineage, she hated him and beat him and despitefully used him. She never gushed, it is true, over her offspring; but the little Buttons flourished under genuine motherment. They, inconsiderable brats, were her veritable children. Whereas he, Paul-it was as p

ere with us," said the pri

ith lofty resignation stamped on his noble brow. "Let us trust

for them, and he, t

he edge of the hopeless town which rose above them in forbidding buildings, belching chimney shafts and the spikes of a couple of spires. On the other sides it was bounded by the brick walls of factories, the municipal gasworks and the approach to the railway station, indicated by signal-posts standing out against the sky like gallows, and a tram-line bordered by a row of skeleton cottages. Golgotha was a grim garden compared with Paul's brickfield. Sometimes the children of the town scuttled about it like dingy little rabbits. But more often it was a desolate solitude. Perhaps all but the lowest of the

ation that he had been sitting there most of the day. With a sigh he replaced his book in the hole, which he cunningly masked with a lump of hard clay, and, feeling stiff and cold, ran, childlike, homeward. In the silence of the night he took out his cornelian heart and fondled it. The day had be

native child's vanity, but the unalterable, serene conviction of a child's soul. The prince and princess were realities, his future greatness a magnificent certitude. You must remember this, if you would understand P

ng to knock hell out of th

emptuously, as became one of his noble bloo

that t

eated th

blustered the coc

, Billy received vociferous and sanguin

hit me!"

at from his head, the sword from his hand, and invested himself with these insignia of leadership, Billy melted silently into the subfusc air of Budge Street. The ragged regiment looked around and there was no Billy. Paul Kegworthy, the raggedest of them all, with nothing to recommend him but his ridiculous exotic beauty and the paper and wooden spolia opima of the vanquished, stood before them, a tattered Caesar. The gang hung spellbound. They were ready, small band of heroes, to follow him against the hordes of Stamford Street. They only awaited his signal. Paul tasted a joy known but to few of the sons of men-absolute power over, and supreme contempt for, his fellows. He stood for a moment or two, in the grey, miserable street discordant with the wailings of babies and the clamour of futile little girls, who, after the manner of women, had no idea of political crisis, and the shril

akin lead the gang, vice Billy Goodge deposed, while he himself remained aloof. Now and then he condescended to arbitrate between disputants or to kick a little brute of a bully, but he felt that, in doing so, he was derogating from his high dignity. It was his joy

m the gang of Budge Street. It existed for him no more than did the little girls and babies. Life changed its aspect entirely. Gone were the days of vagabondage, the lazy, the delicious even though cold and hungry hours of dreaming and reading in the brickfield; gone was the happy freedom of the chartered libertine of the gutter. He was bound, a little slave, like hundreds of other little slaves and thousands of big ones, to a relentless machine. He entered the hopeless factory gate at six

eleased, except through death or illness or incompetence. And the incompetent starved. Any child in Budge Street with a grain of sense knew that. There was no release. He, son of a prince, would work for ever and ever in Bludston. His heart failed him. And there was no one to whom he could tell the tragic and romantic story of his birth. One or two happy gleams of brightness, however, lightened his darkness and prevented the Vision from fading entirely into the greyness of the factory sky. Once the Owner, an unspeakable god with a bald pink head and a paunch vastly chained with gold, conducted a party of ladies over the works. One of the latter, a very grand lady, noticed him at his bench and came-and spoke kindly to him. Her voice had the same sweet timbre as his goddess's. After she had left him his quick ears caught her question to the Owner: "Where did you get your

prince will be no bett

hee," his friend would reply, and lau

t his passionate antagonism to the communistic theory, all the more intense through suppression, strengthened his fantastic faith. Still, the transient smile of a marchioness and the political economy of a sour-avised operative are not enough to keep alive the romance of underfed, ill-clad, overdriven childhood. And after a while he was deprived even of the latter consolation, his friend being shif

ng about all the time? Supposing it was me that went away and came back in a gold coach

e elderly child of ten, "and, if mother he

away, darkly conscious of having magnanimously given Ada a chance to mount with him into the upper air, which opportunity s

s morbidly to death. But his dramatic imagination always carried him beyond' his own demise to the scene in the household when his waxlike corpse should be discovered dangling from a rope fixed to the hook in the kitchen ceiling. He posed cadaverous before a shocked Budge Street, before a conscience-stricken factory; and he wept on his sack bed in the scullery beca

or so at the factory, if Barney Bill, a grotesque god from the

er horns nor goat's feet were visible; nor was the pipe of reed on which he played. Yet he played, in Paul's ear, the comforting melody of Pan, and th