“I am your slave,” answered the child without hesitating; which indicated that this was not the first time he had said it. “Get up,” ordered the other. The boy got up. “Imitate B., the way he looks when he comes into class!” B. was a teacher who went on crutches. The boy went a couple of steps outside the ring, which opened to give him space; then he came back on the improvised stage and executed as he did so the movements of a man walking on crutches. He did his part very well; the illusion was complete, and the onlookers applauded, but the little actor stood there with a serious expression. He had a pallid little face and black clothes; perhaps he had just lost his father or mother. “Laugh!” ordered the other with a light flick of the whip which he had in his hand. The boy tried to obey, but it did not come easily. The laugh sounded forced at the start, but it was not long before he succeeded in laughing himself into a genuine, quite natural guffaw, and with that he turned toward his “master,” as if it was at him that he laughed. But the latter already desired to have his slave show off new accomplishments. “Say: ‘My farsher is a damned scoundrel!’” The boy looked around the circle with a helpless glance. When he saw that no one gave a semblance of wanting to help him, and that, on the contrary, all stood in eager expectation of something really amusing, he said as low as he dared: “My farsher is a damned scoundrel.” That drew unbounded applause. “Laugh--Cry!” The child began to simulate weeping, but with that he now came into the mood he was ordered to imagine. The weeping stuck in his throat, and he shed actual tears. “Let him be!” said an older boy in the circle, “he’s crying in earnest.” And with that the school bell rang. * * * * * Some days afterwards he ran past me on the way from school. I noticed that his jacket was ripped open in the back. “Wait a bit!” I said to him, “your jacket has split open in the back.” “No,” he said, “it hasn’t split open, they have cut it open with a penknife.” “Have they dirtied your book for you, too?” I asked. “Yes, they’ve laid it in the gutter.” “Why are they so mean to you?” “I don’t know. They are stronger than I am.” He knew of no other reason. But of course that was not the only one; they must have found something in him that irritated them. I saw it in him that he was not like the others. The exceptional, the divergent always irritates children and mobs. A school-boy’s eccentricities are punished by the teacher with a well-intended monition or a dry satiric smile; but by his comrades they are punished with kicks and cuffs and a bloody nose, with a torn jacket, a cap carefully laid under a rain-spout, and his best book thrown into the gutter.