n 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