There, in the bright sunshine, with the birds and butterflies glancing all about him, and the woods and fields calling to him to explore them, he grew strong once more, until, little by little, he learned to get along so gloriously that he could hardly make himself believe that he was the same boy at all. And for this great blessing, which in all his life he had never dared hope for, Toots felt from the very bottom of his heart that he was indebted to the friendship and intimacy which he had come to have with old Mahmoud.
CHAPTER V
Said the fat white grub to the new spoon hook,
With a cynical smile and a scornful look:
"Pray accept my very best wishes.
It is true you dazzle their eyes, I suppose,
But the fact remains, as every one knows,
That I am the food for fishes."
—Lay of the Minstrel Pike.
oots sat on the smooth top of a boulder on the river bank, gazing deep down into the pool at his feet. The pool was shaded by the overhanging branches of a cottonwood tree. The warm air was filled with the fragrance of the country. It had painted the boy's cheeks a healthy brown, and caused him to thrill with a sense of strength that was new and delightful. The good surgeon's promise was fulfilled; Toots' leg was now as straight as that of any boy, and no longer was it burdened by the weight of iron straps. Concerning the iron straps he had just one regret; when he returned to his friends, the Menial People, would Mahmoud be able to recognize him, thus bereft of those symbols of their affinity? He would soon know, for he and the Princess—whose guest Toots was at her father's country home during the period of his convalescence—were to return in a few days.
Near where Toots sat, the Princess played beside a little brook that gurgled over its bed of cobble-stones. She was amusing herself poking the end of a stick under the stones in the bed of the brook. Occasionally a crawfish would dart out backward, glare at her savagely with its beady eyes and snap its clumsy claws at the stick, whereupon the Princess would utter a ladylike little shriek and retire to another part of the brook. Suddenly she clapped her hands and exclaimed: