And I’m the wise, wise man of the
Wide, wide world.”
They gazed at him wide-eyed in the hushed summer woodland. Then they beat their hands together, crying, “Oh, again, again, please.”
The boy smiled tantalizingly. “Can you climb?” He shot the question out. The next moment he was scrambling up a tall oak. Sometimes his body was lost in leaves. Sometimes it sounded as though he were tumbling, tumbling through the branches to the ground. At last, from a bough high up where the sky commenced, his impish face gazed down on them. First they heard the mouth-organ, then the voice, singing of somewhere, nowhere, anywhere—of the splendidly imagined No-Man’s-Land through which every child has longed to wander.
And they believed his song, as though it were autobiography. In a picture-flash they saw the world, beautiful, tumultuous, full of terrors—saw it as a vast balloon, swimming through eternal clouds, painted with the dreams of young desire: islands in sun-drenched seas, where palms stood motionless, pointing to the skies with silent hands; countries of yellow men, small and crafty, who lived in paper houses and fed on flowers; enfeebled cities, dazzlingly white, whose eyes had been burnt out by the door of hell left open in the iron heavens; and snow-deserts where the frost carved Titans with his breath.
This freckled pugnacious master of the mouth-organ,
This pugnacious master of the mouth organ, caroling a street song in the tree-turrets of Friday Lane, became for them the embodied soul of adventure.
