call it your best I, for short. Oswald's "best I" was
glad to go and talk to that boy whose father was in prison, but the
Oswald that generally exists hated being out of the games. Yet the whole
Oswald, both the best and the ordinary, was pleased that he was the one
chosen to be a detachment of consolation.

He went out under the great archway, and as he went he heard the games
beginning again. This made him feel noble, and yet he was ashamed of
feeling it. Your feelings are a beastly nuisance, if once you begin to
let yourself think about them. Oswald soon saw the broken boots of the
boy whose father was in jail so nobody would play with him, standing on
the stones near the top of the wall where it was broken to match the
boots.

He climbed up and said, "Hullo!"

To this remark the boy replied, "Hullo!"

Oswald now did not know what to say. The sorrier you are for people the
harder it is to tell them so.

But at last he said--

"I've just heard about your father being where he is. It's beastly rough
luck. I hope you don't mind my saying I'm jolly sorry for you."

The boy had a pale face and watery blue eyes. When Oswald said this his
eyes got waterier than ever, and he climbed down to the ground before he
said--

"I don't care so much, but it do upset mother something crool."

It is awfully difficult to console those in affliction. Oswald thought
this, then he said--

"I say; never mind if those beastly kids won't play with you. It isn't
your fault, you know."

"Nor it ain't father's neither," the boy said; "he broke his arm
a-falling off of a rick, and he hadn't paid up his club money along of
mother's new baby costing what it did when it come, so there warn't
nothing--and what's a hare or two, or a partridge? It ain't as if it was
pheasants as is as dear to rear as chicks."

Oswald did not know what to say, so he got out his new
pen-and-pencil-combined and said--

"Look here! You can have this to keep if you like."

The pale-eyed boy took it and looked at it and said--

"You ain't foolin' me?"

And Oswald said no he wasn't, but he felt most awfully rum and uncomfy,
and though he wanted most frightfully to do something for the boy he
felt as if he wanted to get away more than anything else, and he never
was gladder in his life than when he saw Dora coming along, and she
said--

"You go back and play, Oswald. I'm tired and I'd like to sit down a
bit."

She got the boy to sit down beside her, an