Joan was going to make a fuss, when Bambo put in quickly, "Hush, missy! you mustn't do that, or Moll will hear you. Let me try to answer your question, although I hardly know how. I'm only a boy in size, as you say—a small boy; yet in years I am a man, for I was four-and-twenty last May, the tenth of May," he added thoughtfully. "But I'm not a man as other men.—And you need not mind your sister saying that I'm not grown up," he continued, laying a thin hand on Darby's dark head, "for neither I am—leastways not like other folks.—I'm a dwarf, dearies—a poor, stunted bit of a thing like yon fir over yonder that has grown this way, that way, and every way except straight up and down like the rest of the trees about it. I'm Bambo the dwarf, Joe Harris's musical dwarf," and the little man laughed whimsically.
"Maybe I'll be different in the next world," he continued, after a moment's silence, which the children did not break, as they could think of nothing suitable to say, therefore tactfully held their peace. "I hope I shall, I believe I shall," he added, with a far-away look in his eyes, as if he had become unconscious of his audience; "for has not the blessed Lord Himself said, 'Behold, I make all things new'?"
Here he was seized with a violent fit of coughing, which shook his poor frame sadly, and left him panting and spent.
"You's got a werry bad cold," said Joan, with a pretty air of concern. "Can't you take some nashty medicine or sticky sweeties or cough drops to make you better?"
"Our nurse or our aunt always rubs us with stuff called 'lyptus, and sometimes puts a poultice on when we've got cold," Darby remarked. "I don't s'pose they'll have any 'lyptus in the caravan; but wouldn't you try the poultice?"
"Ay, sonny; only it wouldn't do me any good. I never was used with physic or poulticing; and I'll be better soon without anything," answered the dwarf, trying to stifle another fit of coughing lest it should distress the little ones. "I'll be quite well, in fact—before long, too," he added softly, with his shrunken face raised to the sky whence, with shining, sleepless eyes, the stars looked down upon the odd little group as if they were God's sentinels guarding the outposts where danger lurked.
"P'raps you shouldn't sit on the grass; it's usually damp at night," said Darby, in that quaint, old-world way of his which always attracted people greatly even when it most amused them. "Nurse doesn't allow us to sit on the grass when we're not well.—Sure she doesn't, Joan?"
"Never, never!" Joan affirmed solemnly, shaking her tangled golden head.
The dwarf got to his feet.
"Very well; I'll have to obey, I suppose," he said with a smile. "Now, I must find out where you two are to be put up for the night. It's high time you were under shelter. This sort of thing," he went on, waving his hand towards the open space, the caravan, the dying fire, and the chained bear, "is not what you're used to; anybody with half an eye could see that—even Joe, although it suits his purpose to pretend he doesn't. To-morrow you'll tell me all about your home and your people, and how you wandered this way, and everything. Then we'll see what's to be done next," he added under his breath.