This is a picture on which a kind heart loves to
rest. But who shall make the picture real?
Go and first catch your little Arab, if you can. I say, if you can;
for he is too old to be caught by chaff, and you shall need as much
guile as any fowler ever did. Then with patient hands bestow on his
body its first baptism of clean water, a task often unspeakably
shocking; reduce to fit size and shape a cast-off suit humbly begged
for the occasion, and give him his first experience of decent
clothing. Thereafter, proceed to the work, sometimes the most trying
ever undertaken, of taming this singularly acute, desperately sly,
and often ferociously savage little Englishman, training him to be
what he is not, or harder task still, to be not what he is. Having,
by dint of much pains and many prayers, obtained, as you hope, some
beginnings of victory over the most wayward of wills, and the most
unaccountably strange of mixed natures, with its intellectual
sharpness and moral bluntness, its precocious knowingness and
stereotyped childishness, its quickness to learn and slowness to
unlearn, prepare for the next stage of your enterprise. Lay out your
scheme of emigration, get the money where you can, that is to say,
call it flown from heaven and wile it out of earthly pockets,
anticipate all possible emergencies and wants by land and sea, finish
for the time the much epistolary correspondence to which this same
fragment of humanity has given rise, tempt the deep with your
restless charge, bear the discomforts of the stormiest of seas, and
inwardly groan at the signs of other and worse tempests ready ever to
burst forth in the Atlantic of that young sinner's future course; and
when after many weeks of anxious thought, fatiguing travel, and
laborious inquiry you find a home for the child, fold your hands,
give thanks and say, "What an adventure! What a toil! But now at
length it is finished!" And yet perhaps it is not half finished.
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