"It is not long," said the invisible cicerone, "since that little boy was stolen from the mortals. He still can weep."
Master Nathaniel felt a sudden tightening in his throat. Poor little boy! Poor little lonely boy! What was it he reminded him of? Something painful, and very near his heart.
Round and round trudged the pony, round and round went the hidden musical-box, grinding out its thin, blurred tunes.
Why did she cock her pretty blue eye
At the lad with the silver buckles,
When the penniless lad who was handsome and spry
Got nought but a rap on his knuckles?
These vulgar songs, though faded, were not really old. Nevertheless, to Master Nathaniel, they were the oldest songs in existence—sung by the Morning Stars when all the world was young. For they were freighted with his childhood, and brought the memory, or, rather, the tang, the scent, of the solemn innocent world of children, a world sans archness, sans humour, sans vulgarity, where they had sounded as pure and silvery as a shepherd's pipe. Where the little charmer with her puce bow, and the scheming hussy who had cocked her blue eye had been own sisters to the pretty fantastic ladies of the nursery rhymes, like them walking always to the accompaniment of tinkling bells and living on frangipane and sillabubs of peaches and cream; and whose gestures were stylised and actions preposterous—nonsense actions that needed no explanation. While mothers-in-law, shrewish wives, falling in love—they were just pretty words like brightly-coloured beads, strung together without meaning.
As Master Nathaniel listened, he knew that other people would have heard other tunes—whatever tunes through the milkman's whistle, or the cracked fiddle of a street musician, or the voices of young sparks returning from the tavern at midnight, the Morning Stars may have happened to sing in their own particular infancy.
Oh, you little charmer with your pretty puce bow,