🥀 _“Do you bite your thumb at us, Sir?” “I do bite my thumb, Sir.” “Do you bite your thumb at us, Sir?” “No, Sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, Sir; but I bite my thumb, Sir.”_

🥀 Across the “backy-garden,” at the rear of the house where the Children dwelt—the child of tumult, his luminous little dark sister, and the somewhat older ones—and over the young poplars from George Meredith’s garden, ran a small street with shops and lodgings. It was very full of children, and sometimes they leant so far out of the upper windows that the question arose in the Children’s home, Would a neighbourly present of nursery window-bars be received with little or with much contempt, or perhaps declined, and if so with offended feelings or without? The Children themselves did not encourage the project. The children at the back were very proud, they said. And how did they show the passion? It was asked. “Well, mother, they come to the window, and black their boots at us.”

🥀 Of all the many surprises of childish replies, this was not the least. It was given in great gravity and good faith. To these young observers the action of their opposite neighbours admitted no other interpretation, albeit there had been no exchange of covert verbal defiances, such as, “Do you black your boots at us?” “We do black our boots.” “Do you black your boots at us?” “We do not black our boots at you; but we black our boots.” The demonstration was not of battle, as “I will frown as I pass by, and let them take it as they list”—but of sole, sufficient pride, silent, detached, lifted between heaven and earth, at the second-floor windows of its appropriate street. It was not for a mere grown-up person to introduce doubts, or to suggest how far from the usual manifestations of pride, how different from its customary pomps, is the symbolism of blacking and of boots. No doubt the children were right, and declined our symbolism on their own good authority.

🥀 Their conclusion as to the boots had probably its own obscure justification, and was not due to unworthy suspiciousness, for the Children were disposed to friendliness, and would have inclined rather to a lenient than to a severe interpretation of the act of demonstrative blacking, had there been room for doubt. At a taller and quite remote row of windows appeared the heads of other children, of whom Pride seemed to have made no victims. At least there appeared among them no signs of blacking. With these the more usually intelligible language of toys was the means of communication. At long range—so long that a walking duck could hardly be distinguished from a mechanical alligator, and dolls looked as much alike as the heroines of a year’s novels—toy was held up for sympathetic and companionable rivalry with toy; and across intervening roofs, by means that yet remain a mystery, the pet names of both batches of children had been announced and exchanged. Never was so enterprising and prosperous a friendship on facilities so slender. The delays, hesitations, and reserves of acquaintances begun in the ordinary ways, in houses, in Kensington Gardens, or otherwise on point-blank terms, never troubled these mutual advances. Or so it seemed. But with some surprise the mother of the Children, walking with them, perceived that they cast looks askance, neither wholly strange nor in any wise intimate, at another walking group, equally lowering, gloomy with an equal kind of unavowed intelligence, and with an equally embarrassed mother. The children of Pride, walking in the street perhaps with those very boots new-blacked, could hardly have been watched with more sombre or more cloudy eyes. Afraid lest her young ones should have committed the _grossièreté_ of making enemies, the mother of the Children asked them, in their unwonted silence, who it was that they seemed to be cutting. With surprise she then heard that these strangers, seen at full length, were they whose distant eager heads were invested with so much childish friendship in the windows under the skies. Within an hour or so after that unfriendly encounter, with its shadowy strangeness and vigilance of eyes, all was restored at the high back-windows, and a London sunset showed the ambiguous toys—new ones, just bought in the course of that walk estranged—the signalling hands, and the jostling heads unequal of height, at their former intercourse, candid, clear, familiar, and full of spirit and drama.

🥀 Distance seemed to set these gallant little creatures free from some of the disadvantages of the world and from the uneasiness of crowds. They were released in a world barely sprinkled with people within hail of one another, glad of recognition, and made friends by intervening space, and liberty partaken.

🥀 Perhaps it was the childish solitude that made the window-communication so clear. Almost painful to the writer is still the memory of introductions in childhood. Ah, to be placed in front of three little natives in white embroidery, and bidden to talk with them in Genoese, or in any human tongue, with parents artificially listening in compliment to the stranger’s children, but solicitous for their own! There are moments that are literally difficult to live through, and this was of them. Solitude and a garden hedge between, or some such other slight defence and distance, and Genoese no doubt would have flowed.

🥀 Nor can one easily forget the unexpressed misgivings at those invitations to play with the stranger’s children in the gardens of the Tuileries. It was already depressing enough to stand on a counter to be fitted, and to hear the _modiste_ tell one’s mother that one ought to have the _petit jupon bouffant_ which one had not, and that no coat could have justice without it. But to be accosted, under this visible disability, by the children of Paris, little girls obviously furnished with the _petit jupon bouffant_—this was the cause of a dumb shyness. “_Veux-tu venir jouer avec moi?_” So ran the invariable invitation of the charming Parisians, little citizens so well civilized as to need no defences, no barriers, no return to the space and the distances of birds in search of primitive confidence, or to the rarity of angels in quest of natural courage. The English child kept in the after years of life the sense of national defeat that attended the consent to that unequal game. If Waterloo was won upon the playing-fields of Eton, it has been many times avenged on the playing-grounds of the garden of the Tuileries.

🥀 Otherwise, and the conditions being more free and more nearly equal, to play with strangers, to play internationally, was a great delight. The game, being all dramatic, did away with any need for close knowledge of the actor. Since yonder boy was a spirited horse of uncertain temper, his temper as a boy was of small importance. There was no need even for names when all the players alike were terra-cotta pipkins for sale, to be known as sound or cracked by their voices under a blow. Quarrels never arose in these encounters of an hour. Our playfellows were toys of the liveliest animation, but without so much perceptible character as might chance to ruffle our own. The concert of Europe was undisturbed.

🥀 One only remembrance is fraught with some self-reproach. It is that of two little English girls, who chose to frighten all the children of an Italian village and sweep the hill of them. It was done without malice, but with a horrid sense of dominance; and without violence except that of mere running. The population—sad to remember—was so gentle that its full number of children, of several ages, were thus to be hunted down the slopes of the chestnut-woods, by the onset of a couple of capricious foreign girls. But so it was. The day was a _festa_, and the children, carrying their shoes, strolled on the hill-side, between the cypresses and the belfries. All things go in unequal groups on such an afternoon—little companies of church-bell tunes, young men playing at bowls, no one alone. The village children loitered principally about the steep avenues to the church. But when the two slender invaders began to give chase, the first group scattered, and then the next, perhaps not knowing how little formidable were the hunters; then a third broke, a fourth wheeled. Young Italians do not run without clamour, and the outcry of the dismay of all those children seemed the wilder that the two pursuers kept their breath for the hunting. One swept the wood, another charged down the narrow road. They joined, they closed upon the quarry, or in open order cut off the escape of scattered fugitives. Of the little villagers there was not found one to resist, or so much as to question the attack. They cried out to each other, pointing the probable way to safety as they ran. That they must run was the one thing they were sure of, and they sped over rough and smooth, heads down, so that the heights were presently clear of them, and their last clamours dropped as they reached the shelter of the street, like the cries of birds that wheel and settle after an alarm. The two representatives of the predominant races, who cannot have measured nine feet between them, sat down in the conquered district, flushed with success. Alas!