“Lord temper the wind to you, my lamb!” said the good Mesrour, kneeling
down, that I might have a comforting shoulder for my head to rest on,
“your Pa’s dead!”
Haroun Alraschid took to flight at the words; the Seraglio vanished; from
that moment, I never again saw one of the eight of the fairest of the
daughters of men.
I was taken home, and there was Debt at home as well as Death, and we had
a sale there. My own little bed was so superciliously looked upon by a
Power unknown to me, hazily called “The Trade,” that a brass
coal-scuttle, a roasting-jack, and a birdcage, were obliged to be put
into it to make a Lot of it, and then it went for a song. So I heard
mentioned, and I wondered what song, and thought what a dismal song it
must have been to sing!
Then, I was sent to a great, cold, bare, school of big boys; where
everything to eat and wear was thick and clumpy, without being enough;
where everybody, large and small, was cruel; where the boys knew all
about the sale, before I got there, and asked me what I had fetched, and
who had bought me, and hooted at me, “Going, going, gone!” I never
whispered in that wretched place that I had been Haroun, or had had a
Seraglio: for, I knew that if I mentioned my reverses, I should be so
worried, that I should have to drown myself in the muddy pond near the
playground, which looked like the beer.
Ah me, ah me! No other ghost has haunted the boy’s room, my friends,
since I have occupied it, than the ghost of my own childhood, the ghost
of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief. Many a time have I
pursued the phantom: never with this man’s stride of mine to come up with
it, never with these man’s hands of mine to touch it, never more to this
man’s heart of mine to hold it in its purity. And here you see me
working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of shaving in
the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up
with the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion.