over there,' he answered, indicating with a sweep of his
arm the northern half of London where it lay darkening behind the
chimney-fringed horizon; 'I often come and sit here.'

It seemed an odd pastime for so very small a citizen. 'And what makes
you like to come and sit here?' I said.

'Oh, I don't know,' he replied, 'I think.'

'And what do you think about?'

'Oh--oh, lots of things.'

He inspected me shyly out of the corner of his eye, but, satisfied
apparently by the scrutiny, he sidled up a little nearer.

'Mama does not like this evening time,' he confided to me; 'it always
makes her cry. But then,' he went on to explain, 'Mama has had a lot of
trouble, and that makes anyone feel different about things, you know.'

I agreed that this was so. 'And do you like this evening time?' I
enquired.

'Yes,' he answered; 'don't you?'

'Yes, I like it too,' I admitted. 'But tell me why you like it, then I
will tell you why I like it.'

'Oh,' he replied, 'things come to you.'

'What things?' I asked.

Again his critical eye passed over me, and it raised me in my own
conceit to find that again the inspection contented him, he evidently
feeling satisfied that here was a man to whom another gentleman might
speak openly and without reserve.

He wriggled sideways, slipping his hands beneath him and sitting on
them.

'Oh, fancies,' he explained; 'I'm going to be an author when I grow up,
and write books.'

Then I knew why it was that the sight of his little figure had drawn me
out of my path to sit beside him, and why the little serious face had
seemed so familiar to me, as of some one I had once known long ago.

So we talked of books and bookmen. He told me how, having been born on
the fourteenth of February, his name had come to be Valentine, though
privileged parties, as for example Aunt Emma, and Mr. Dawson, and Cousin
Naomi, had shortened it to Val, and Mama would sometimes call him
Pickaniny, but that was only when they were quite alone. In return I
confided to him my name, and discovered that he had never heard it,
which pained me for the moment, until I found that of all my confreres,
excepting only Mr. Stevenson, he was equally ignorant, he having lived
with the heroes and the heroines of the past, the new man and the new
woman, the new pathos and the new humour being alike unknown to him.

Scott and Dumas and Victor Hugo were his favourites. 'Gulliver's
Travels,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Don Quixote,' an