Page:Piccino and Other Child Stories (1897).djvu/172

160 to his family that morning of April 5, 1876, in a certain house in Paris, he may have known all this, and laid out his little plans with adroitness and deliberation; but when I first examined him carefully, as he lay on my arm, looking extremely harmless and extremely fast asleep in his extremely long nightgown, he did not bear at all the aspect of a crafty and designing person; he only looked warm and comfortable, and quite resigned to his situation.

He had been clever enough to disguise himself as a baby—a quite new baby, in violet powder and a bald head and a florid complexion. He had even put on small, indefinite features and entirely dispensed with teeth, besides professing inability to speak, a fastidious simplicity of taste in the matter of which limited him to the most innocuous milk diet. But beneath this disguise there he lurked, the small individual who, seven years later—apparently quite artlessly and unconsciously—presented his smiling, ingenuous little face to the big world, and was smiled back upon by it—Little Lord Fauntleroy. He was a quite unromantic little person. Only a prejudiced maternal parent could have picked him out from among seventy-five other babies of the same age; but somehow we always felt that he had a tiny character of his own, and somehow it was always an amusing little character, and one's