Einstein gestured me toward the piano, and began to tune his violin. It was obvious that his pitch was perfect. I was horrified.

“Do you mean you want me to accompany you?” I said, weak with fear.

“No, no, we play together,” he said, and tucked the fiddle under his chin.

My blood ran cold. In all the vast repertoire of music in which the violin and piano can mingle there is only one piece that I would dare attempt. It is a Humoresque by Dvorak—the Number 7 in G flat. You know it. Popular musical taste has accorded words to it, words selected from a well-known railway notice:

But when Einstein speaks, who am I to disobey? So I sat at the piano, and to my astonishment I saw, on the music desk before my eyes, the score of Bach’s Six Sonatas for Clavier and Violin. Einstein made a slight dip with his bow, as a signal, my hands flew to the keyboard, and there followed such a flood of exquisite music as had never come out of that piano in its existence. And it was I who was making this glorious sound! Einstein was a pretty good violinist—extremely good for a physicist—but I was a musical marvel. Little by little I took possession of this totally unaccustomed skill. Pride surged through me. I began to refine upon my playing, and to do things properly which Glenn Gould would probably have foozled. I was like a man transformed, endowed with the power to play music as I had imagined it.

Then it happened. There was a sudden discord in the bass end of the piano, and I saw that a gigantic dog had brought its great head down on the keyboard with a crash. Einstein stopped; I stopped; the dog regarded us both with eyes rimmed by nasty, wet red flesh.

“I’m sorry if Dougal has interrupted your music,” said a high, sweet, clear voice. “But I really must speak to Professor Einstein without delay.”

The speaker was the most beautiful boy I have ever seen in my life. His graceful childish figure was dressed in a black velvet suit and close-fitting knee-breeches from which emerged legs, clothed in black silk stockings, that Marlene Dietrich might have envied. The velvet suit had a white collar of exquisite lace, and about the handsome, manly little face clustered lovelocks of long fair hair falling in a profusion of curls.

You know who it was, of course. And I, from recollections of my childhood reading of the novel of which he was the hero, was able to greet him with a cry which surely fell in familiar and welcome cadence on his ears.

“God bless your lordship! God bless your pretty face! Good luck and happiness to your lordship! Welcome to you!”

The child bowed in response to my greeting.

It was Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Modern children do not seem to know his name, or the book by Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett in which his story is told. But surely this is a temporary lapse of fame; his romance is undying, a superb realization of what Dr. Jung of Zurich has named the Archetype of the Miraculous Child.

Most of you are familiar with him, though there may be one or two among you, under thirty, to whom he is a stranger. But millions of readers, old and young, have thrilled to the tale of little Cedric Errol, born in New York of an American mother—whom he never addressed or referred to except as ‘Dearest’, because that is what his English father, who had died so young, had always called her. Cedric considered himself to be an American, and indeed he exhibited all the American characteristics, total candour, boundless self-confidence, naturally fine manners, and a democratic spirit almost too zealous to be wholly believable. But certainly in Cedric there was nothing affected about this democracy; his dearest friends were Mr. Hobbs, the groceryman, Dick the shoeshine boy, and the poor old woman who sold apples at the street-corner; he did good to many others, among the poor and needy, for whom his tender little heart was always grieved. Judge then of the reader’s astonishment when he discovers that this typical little American is, because of the death of a number of relatives on his father’s side, the heir of the great Earl of Dorincourt, and that his true name is Lord Fauntleroy.

How Cedric softens the hard heart of his grandfather, the Earl (a typical English nobleman, proud, domineering, with blood so blue you could use it for ink, but nonetheless a splendid creature and exceedingly rich) and how Cedric makes all his grandfather’s tenants happy, and how Cedric persuades his haughty grandfather to accept Dearest, who, though an American, is nevertheless a lady, and how Cedric gets Mr. Hobbs the groceryman and Dick the shoeshine boy to England, and settles them close to Dorincourt Castle, so that he can go on being democratic at them—all of this is familiar to you. Familiar also are the drawings done for the book by Reginald B. Birch, which made the appearance of all the characters, but especially the ringleted, velvet-suited little lord, familiar to millions of infatuated readers from 1886 at least until 1925.

And there he stood, in my music room, confronting Professor Einstein and myself. Not only Fauntleroy, but the huge, drooling, red-eyed mastiff Dougal, his Grandfather’s pet and the little lord’s inseparable companion.

I wondered what he had come for, so, with a directness which I was sure such a democratic child would appreciate, I put the question.

“What have you come for, m’lord?” said I.

He laughed. It was the characteristic laugh of an innocent child, like silver bells, and it set up an answering echo in the piano.

“I want to ask a favour of Professor Einstein,” he said.

“Certainly not,” said I; “no guest of Massey College may be asked for favours.”

“Oh please—oh pretty-please and sugar-plums,’ said Lord Fauntleroy, winsomely. “Surely you haven’t forgotten that this is the Year of the Child?”

I had forgotten. In spite of all the newspaper hullabaloo, and appeals for this, that and the other thing to increase the influence of children, I had forgotten. Certainly I had not expected the Year of the Child to have anything to do with our College Ghost.

“The Year of the Child is more important than rules,” said Fauntleroy. “Oh, you’d probably never guess how important for the peace of the world. You know, don’t you, that some dear, kind people are trying to establish a Children’s’ Bill of Rights?”

I admitted that I had heard something of the sort. Einstein didn’t bother to answer; he was regarding Little Lord Fauntleroy with big, sad eyes, the expression of which I could read. It was an expression of great weariness, mingled with a noble compassion. It was also the expression of an influential person confronted with a remorseless beggar.

“That is why I have come for advice to Professor Einstein, the author of Why War?” said the beautiful boy. ‘The best of us want a sensible Bill of Rights. You know the sort of thing: nobody is to beat children more than is good for them, and savage people are not to eat children except in case of real necessity, and children are to be loved except when they are unlovable, and children are to be seen and not heard except for exceptional children like me, and children are to be taught sensibly by sensible people, and children are to have pocket-money but not enough to make it possible for them to get into serious trouble. And in return children undertake to be reasonable and pretend to be innocent and believe in Santa Claus and babies being brought by the doctor and all that crap—oh, what have I said!”

“You said, ‘and all that crap’,” said I, wishing to be helpful. Little Lord Fauntleroy was hiding his face in his hands, the very picture of shame.