Our minds played about him. I tried to tease Beulah into adopting him. We spoke of his birth in a reformatory, and the apparently indomitable way in which nature had erased this fact from his personality. We wondered about his unknown mother, and his still more unknown father, and what he would be and how either of us could help keeping him forever. She pleaded her Man, I my poverty. But we were not convincing, and I began to conceive a vague fear of Ernest’s adopting me, because I could not let him go. And then it was time for the train. Ernest was very self-possessed. His manners on leaving Beulah were those of an equal, parting from a very old and jolly friend. The walk to the station gave me a sudden realization how very badly the world was adapted to the needs of little boys. Its measurements, its times, its lengths and its breadths were grotesquely exaggerated. Ernest ploughed manfully along, but I could feel the tug at my hand. Time would have to double itself for him to reach the station in the allotted minutes. His legs were going in great strides like those of the giant in seven-league boots, and he was panting a little. I was cruel, and yet there was the train. I felt myself a symbol of parenthood, earth-adjusted, fixed on an adult goal, dragging little children panting through a world not their own. “I’m ti-yerd!” said Ernest in so plaintive a voice that my heart smote me. Nameless premonitions of what might ensue to Ernest from being ti-yerd came upon me. I felt a vague dread of having already made Ernest an invalid for life. But my adulthood must have triumphed, for the train was caught. Ernest’s spirits revived on the reappearance of the lemon-drops. And my heart leaped to hear him say that only his legs were ti-yerd, and that now they were no longer so. The world had diminished again to his size. III