Country life -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Siblings -- Fiction
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 loose-jointed 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--merely gone. Never specially cherished while he tarried with
us, he had yet contrived to build himself a particular niche of his own.
Sunrise and sunset, and the dinner-bell, and the sudden rainbow, and
lessons, and Leotard, and the moon through the nursery windows--they
were all part of the great order of things, and the displacement of any
one item seemed to disorganize the whole machinery. The immediate point
was, not that the world would continue to go round as of old, but that
Leotard wouldn't.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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