In the world of Western literature

The narrator said:

People tell delightful tales about abandoned little ones, about their sweetness, and about their sting-ing answers that come as though "engraved and inlaid."

But Johnny — our son by adoption — was not like other children. He was a "street tough"; his talk was like that of alley boys, and his movements were so violent that at first we feared to let him share in the life of our three children.

Before he came to our house he used to "run wild" with a gang of idlers older than himself. One day they laid stones on a railway line and threw a freight train off the track. The older ones were sent to the "reformatory," and the judges began asking themselves what they were to do with Johnny, who was only ten years old.

His mother was dead; as for his father, he was in the ranks of those who can find no work. When we heard his story we came forward and asked to take him to our summer place on the seashore for two weeks, until his case could be arranged and he sent to a suitable orphanage.

And so Johnny arrived at our house carrying a few belongings in a paper bag. He set his bundle on the floor, and his eyes traveled to the table laid for supper.

He shouted:

— What? Is that meat?? And on a Wednesday! "You monkey"!! Do you always eat like this??

I served him a "heaping" plate of meat and vegetables, and he plunged into it with both hands, without fork or knife, and gulped down all that was in it; then he added a second plate. He gorged himself to the point of sickness, so I called in a doctor for him, and when he had examined him he said:

— This is a boy all but dead of hunger. Feed him — only — a teaspoon of milk with a crust of soaked bread every hour, until his stomach is able to receive the other kinds of food.

I put Johnny to bed. The "paja-mas" of my six-year-old son hung slack around that skeleton. It was easy to count his ribs one by one, and his shoulder-blades stuck out like those pasteboard wings children wear on Christmas Eve.

And I fell to communing with myself, while I fed the little starveling spoonful after spoonful of bread soaked in milk:

— What has come over me, that I should have sunk myself into this "plunge-bath"?

After this Johnny improved; he became able to eat three meals a day, but he remained strange in face and figure. The sight of his "lifeless" skin was truly painful. And that drooping mouth, and that forehead wrinkled "like an

accordion" — and there was in his voice a deep hoarseness, as if rising from the tombs, that made us fear consumption for him.

Johnny knew that he was in our house for fifteen days only, and when the time came for him to go he was seized with violent vomiting. I put him to bed, and while I was dosing him he began to implore me, in the grip of a mad terror:

— Oh! Oh... let me stay with you, if you will. I'll do everything you want me to do, if it pleases you to keep me with you.

I said:

— And how am I to keep you?? You never stop hitting the children, and you cheat at every game, so that not one child will play with you, and you never speak one word of truth, so that we do not even know what to believe.

He said, begging and imploring:

— I promise you — if you keep me — to become a sensible boy.

And my heart softened. And I promised him that I would keep him. In the evening he ran to meet "Papa," to carry him the glad news... I was uneasy, asking myself how the matter would strike my husband... and my mind was set at rest when he came in and said with the utmost simplicity:

— It appears we have been blessed with a new boy.

A nervous cough seized me, and my husband said:

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