Published originally in 1881, The Critic As Artist is one of Oscar Wilde's major aesthetic statements.

    The sun never penetrated there beyond the third-storey windows—which is why the charwoman, his mother, was so long in discovering her child's strange gift.One day, when she and her boy were out playing, the boy stopped for a moment. He stood and smiled at her with the sun at his back—and his shadow lay upon the whitened steps. But the silhouette was not that of a little breeched boy at all, but of a little girl in petticoats—with long curls, where the charwoman's son was close-cropped!"The Magic Shadow" is one of the dozen-plus stories of everyday life—and of not-so-everyday delight and wonder—in Naughts and Crosses, by the author of The Splendid Spur.