And linking his arm in that of the ragged youngster, the trio sauntered along with the fashionable throng coming out of the matinees.
“Get out of my way, you ugly little sweep,” said one woman, elbowing the boy off the pavement; and the men pushed him hither and thither. The fashionable women looked right through the ragged urchin and his evidently dubious companions, as if they were glass, and their gaze seemed to bite like frost. Not one woman remarked the surpassing loveliness of the boy’s perfect face.
At the corner of the Common the young man sent the boy about his business.
“Who is he, and what does all this mean?”
“That is Adonis—the one-time victor of Venus. He fell upon evil days when clothes made the king, and rags the knave.”
Walter Blackburn Harte.
LIFE.
I sometimes think life is but a see-saw board, with hope at one end and despair at the other. First hope goes up, and despair goes down, and then it reverses. There seems to be no break in the steady rise and fall. We live on, clinging to the belief that hope will outbalance despair, but it does not, and men come and men go, and life still teeters away.