“Oh! if you please, I am lost!”

He looked down, and saw a very little fair-haired girl.

“Yes,” she said, confirming her words with a serious nod.  “I am indeed.  I am lost!”

Greatly perplexed, he stopped, looked about him for help, descried none, and said, bending low.

“Where do you live, my child?”

“I don’t know where I live,” she returned.  “I am lost.”

“What is your name?”

“Polly.”

“What is your other name?”

The reply was prompt, but unintelligible.

Imitating the sound as he caught it, he hazarded the guess, “Trivits.”

“Oh no!” said the child, shaking her head.  “Nothing like that.”

“Say it again, little one.”

An unpromising business.  For this time it had quite a different sound.

He made the venture, “Paddens?”

“Oh no!” said the child.  “Nothing like that.”

“Once more.  Let us try it again, dear.”

A most hopeless business.  This time it swelled into four syllables.  “It can’t be Tappitarver?” said Barbox Brothers, rubbing his head with his hat in discomfiture.

“No!  It ain’t,” the child quietly assented.

On her trying this unfortunate name once more, with extraordinary efforts at distinctness, it swelled into eight syllables at least.

“Ah!  I think,” said Barbox Brothers with a desperate air of resignation, “that we had better give it up.”

“But I am lost,” said the child, nestling her little hand more closely in his, “and you’ll take care of me, won’t you?”

If ever a man were disconcerted by division between compassion on the one hand, and the very imbecility of irresolution on the other, here the man was.  “Lost!” he repeated, looking down at the child.  “I am sure I am.  What is to be done?”

“Where do you live?” asked the child, looking up at him wistfully.

“Over there,” he answered, pointing vaguely in the direction of his hotel.

“Hadn’t we better go there?” said the child.

“Really,” he replied, “I don’t know but what we had.”

So they set off, hand-in-hand.  He, through comparison of himself against his little companion, with a clumsy feeling on him as if he had just developed into a foolish giant.  She, clearly elevated in her own tiny opinion by having got him so neatly out of his embarrassment.

“We are going to have dinner when we get there, I suppose?” said Polly.

“Well,” he rejoined, “I—­Yes, I suppose we are.”

“Do you like your dinner?” asked the child.

“Why, on the whole,” said Barbox Brothers, “yes, I think I do.”

“I do mine,” said Polly.  “Have you any brothers and sisters?”

“No.  Have you?”

“Mine are dead.”

“Oh!” said Barbox Brothers.  With that absurd sense of unwieldiness of mind and body weighing him down, he would have not known how to pursue the conversation beyond this curt rejoinder, but that the child was always ready for him.