And between the man and the woman, the child sat, very still, evidently on good terms with them, not realising that they had brought him out of a warm darkness where he had been happy, out of a sweet nothingness, into which, and soon perhaps, he would pass again--not realising that they had so neglected to keep pace with things, or that things had so omitted to keep pace with them, that he himself had eaten in his time about one half the food he should have eaten, and that of the wrong sort. By the expression of his face, that pale small ghost had evidently grasped the truth that things were as they had to be. He seemed to sit there reviewing his own life, and taking for granted that it must be what it was, from hour to hour, and day to day, and year to year. And before me, too, the incidents of his small journey passed. I saw him in the morning getting off the family bed, where it was sometimes warm, and chewing at a crust of bread before he set off to school in company with other children, some of whom were stouter than himself; saw him carrying in his small fist the remnants of his feast, and dropping it, or swopping it away for peppermints, because it tired him to consume it, having no juices to speak of in his little stomach. I seemed to understand that, accustomed as he was to eating little, he almost always wanted to eat less, not because he had any wish to die--nothing so extravagant--but simply that he nearly always felt a little sick; I felt that his pale, despondent mother was always urging him to eat, when there were things to eat, and that this bored him, since they did not strike him as worth all that trouble with his jaws. She must have found it difficult indeed to persuade him that there was any point at all in eating; for, from his looks, he could manifestly not now enjoy anything but peppermints and kippered herrings. I seemed to see him in his school, not learning, not wanting to learn anything, nor knowing why this should be so, ignorant of the dispensations of a Providence who--after hesitating long to educate him lest this should make his parents paupers--now compelled his education, having first destroyed his stomach that he might be incapable of taking in what he was taught. That small white creature could not as yet have grasped the notion that the welfare of the future lay, not with the future, but with the past. He only knew that every day he went to school with little in his stomach, and every day came back from school with less. All this he seemed to be reviewing as he sat there, but not in thought; his knowledge was too deep for words; he was simply feeling, as a child that looked as he looked would naturally be feeling, on that bench between his parents. He opened his little mouth at times, as a small bird will open its small beak, without apparent purpose; and his lips seemed murmuring: "My stomach feels as if there were a mouse inside it; my legs are aching; it's all quite natural, no doubt!"