Page:Piccino and Other Child Stories (1897).djvu/171

 AND A VERY REAL LITTLE BOY BECAME AN IDEAL ONE

IT has always been rather interesting to me to remember that he first presented himself in an impenetrable disguise. It was a disguise sufficiently artful to have disarmed the most wary. I, who am not at all a far-sighted person, was completely taken in by him. I saw nothing to warrant in the slightest degree any suspicion that he had descended to earth with practical intentions; that he furtively cherished plans of making himself into the small hero of a book, the picturesque subject of illustrations, the inspiration of a fashion in costume, the very jeune premier in a play over which people in two continents would laugh and cry.

Perhaps, in periods before he introduced