The King of the Park

LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR.

Police Sergeant Hardy stood near the Boylston Street entrance to the Fens, his back toward the hundred and fifteen acres of park land which it was his duty to guard, his good-natured face overspread by a smile, as he watched a young lady taking a bicycle lesson in a secluded walk on his left.

The young lady approached the machine held by her instructor as if it were a horse, then springing nimbly on it, her features became rigid with anxiety as she found that her steed would neither go on nor stand still.

Her heroic grapplings and wrestlings with it, her wild gyrations to and fro in the walk, while her teacher dashed madly after her, were so ludicrous that the sergeant, although he was well used to such spectacles, was obliged to turn away to conceal the broad grin that overspread his countenance.

The next object of his attention was a Gordon setter who was gayly trotting into the park, but who, on catching the sergeant’s eye, at once changed his happy-go-lucky demeanor for a guilty shambling gait.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Ormistead’s dog?” said the sergeant in a stern voice, as he glanced at the animal’s collar. “Where’s your escort?”

The setter immediately prostrated himself on the ground, but his humble attitude was belied by the roguish don’t-care expression of the eyes he rolled up at the guardian of the law.

The sergeant waved his hand at him. “Get home with you. You know you can’t run loose here. What would the ducks and the cats say to you; or rather, what would you say to them?”

The dog was not ready to give in. He extended the tip of a very pink tongue, and meekly licked the tip of the sergeant’s shiny boot.

“No nonsense now,” said the man firmly. “You can’t humbug me, and you understand that as well as a Christian. Run home with you.”

The dog sprang up, resumed his careless air, and trotted calmly from the park by the roadway through which he had come.

The sergeant sauntered on. It was a charming September morning. He met a few pedestrians and many nurses and children. It was yet rather early in the day for the carriage people to be out.

A succession of angry childish shrieks made him suddenly wheel round, and look in the direction from which he had come. Two nurses and two children stood by the stone seats near the group of bronze figures erected to the memory of John Boyle O’Reilly.

The sergeant strolled slowly back to them. One of the nurses bent over a little girl who was sobbing violently, and was stamping her foot at a foreign-looking lad with a pale face, who stood at a little distance from her. His nurse, or attendant, for he was rather too old a child to come entirely under a nursery régime, supported him by her presence, and would have taken his hand in hers if he had not drawn it from her.

“And sure you’ve hurt her this time with your murderin’ Frenchy temper,” exclaimed the little girl’s nurse, looking away from her sobbing charge at the silent boy. “It’s a batein’ you ought to have. Come now, tell us what you were after a-doing to her?”

“He took me by the arm and the leg, and he sweeped the ground with me,” cried the little girl peeping at him from between her fingers.

“Och, the young villain,” interrupted her nurse, “and did you?”

The boy shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, it is true; but afterwards embraced her.”

“By the soul of love, but you’re the queer boy,” responded the nurse warmly; “and it’s the likes of you makes the men that thinks they can drag us women round the earth by the hair of our heads, and then make it up with a—I’m sorry for ye, me dear—Bad luck to ye.”

“Hush now, Bridget,” interposed the second nurse, stepping nearer the boy. “Wait till you hear the rights of this. Tell us now, Master Eugene, what did Virgie do to you?”

The boy’s eyes flashed; but he said quietly enough, “Would you have me a talebearer? What would my grandfather say? Ask the child”—and he pointed to the still sobbing Virgie with as grand an air as if he were really the man that he felt himself to be.

“He h-h-hurt my pealings,” wailed Virgie dismally.

“Your pealings; it’s feelings you mean, rose of my heart,” said her nurse, drawing the child nearer to her. “Tell your good Bridget what you did to the naughty boy.”

The little girl, for some reason or other, was shy about confessing the provocation that she had given her playmate; but her nurse, whose curiosity had been aroused, was determined to extract a confession from her, and adroitly made use of the presence of the sergeant, who had by this time arrived on the scene.

“See, lovie dove,” she murmured in the child’s ear, “here’s a great big monster of a policeman, and he’s looking at ye. Tell him sharp.”

The little girl shuddered, hid her face in her nurse’s breast, and whispered, “I ’sulted his remperor.”

“And you served him right,” said Bridget. “The grasping old frog-eater. If I had a child that worshipped his bones, it’s shutting him up in prison I’d be after doing till he learned better sense,” and she made a vindictive gesture in Eugene’s direction.

Her nurse’s championship restored courage to the breast of the little girl; and slipping from her knee, she jumped nimbly to the stone seat beside them, and stretched out both her tiny hands toward the noble head carved above her.

“I ’sulted him,” she cried, tossing back her curls from her flushed rosy cheeks. “I made a face at him like this,” and she screwed up her little visage in a detestable grimace, “and I said, ‘Eugene, I hate your old remperor;’ then he sweeped me over the ground.”

A slight flush overspread the boy’s pale face, but he did not deny the accusation.

“Well, now, Virgie Manning,” said the boy’s nurse in a severe manner, “that was real mean in you. You’re only a little girl, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself to taunt a little boy that sets such store by his emperor. Look at here, officer,” and she appealed to the sergeant; “you’ve often seen us in these Fens. This little boy,” and she pointed to Eugene, “is French, and he’s got such a love for foreign things that you can’t get it out of him. He justs worships the emperor. I don’t rightly know which one it was”—

“His majesty, the great Napoleon, the greatest emperor the world has ever seen,” murmured the boy, lifting his cap with an indescribable mingling of reverence and grace.

“He hasn’t any brothers or sisters or father or mother,” continued the nurse, “and his grandfather’s nearly always away; and ever since he was a little fellow he tells me he’s been used to taking his meals with the picture of this emperor propped against the sugar-bowl; and he declares that this statoo, or figger, or whatever you call it, is like the photograph, and he just worships it; and if he sees any one leaning against this slab, or throwing stones near it, it just makes him crazy; and Virgie knows it, and she does it to tease him; and it ain’t his fault if he struck her or whatever he did,” and the girl threw a glance of defiance at the other nurse.

The sergeant smiled amiably. Among his multifarious duties he was quite well accustomed to being called on to act as arbiter in disputes between young nursery-maids or between their charges; and being somewhat of a philosopher, he was well adapted for the office.

The first thing he usually did was to give the parties engaged in controversy time to get cool while he went off on a side issue; so he said, in a deliberate fashion, “According to my humble opinion, if I was called upon suddenly for it, I should say that there isn’t much resemblance between John Boyle O’Reilly and the great Bonaparte. In the first place, O’Reilly never used a razor on his upper lip; and I guess the great Bonaparte did, judging by his pictures. How do you get over that, son?” and he directed his attention to the small boy in a paternal way.

Eugene looked up adoringly at the silent face above them, and spoke in a choking voice. “I have talked over the affair with Monsieur my grandfather. He agrees with me that there is a slight resemblance. Perhaps after the noble martyr went to St. Helena he was not allowed the use of a razor. Those abominable English”—

His utterance failed him to such a degree that the sergeant stared curiously at him. Was it possible that this small boy was shaken with emotion over the sufferings of the ambitious and despotic arbiter of men’s destinies who was so long since dead?

Yes, it was—the boy was in earnest.

“Do you believe in my emperor?” he asked, turning seriously to the sergeant.

“Well, I don’t know,” said the officer dryly. “I owe my allegiance, as I suppose you’d call it, to our President, to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and to the great American Union. However, I can say I believe in Napoleon to this extent—I believe he lived.”