me, I had liked Sir Topaz best and been
disappointed that it left off in the middle. As I grew older, he would
tell me plots of Balzac's novels, using incident or character as an
illustration for some profound criticism of life. Now that I have read all
the Comedie Humaine, certain pages have an unnatural emphasis, straining
and overbalancing the outline, and I remember how in some suburban street,
he told me of Lucien de Rubempre, or of the duel after the betrayal of his
master, and how the wounded Lucien had muttered "so much the worse" when
he heard someone say that he was not dead.

I now can but share with a friend my thoughts and my emotions, and there
is a continual discovery of difference, but in those days, before I had
found myself, we could share adventures. When friends plan and do
together, their minds become one mind and the last secret disappears. I
was useless at games. I cannot remember that I ever kicked a goal or made
a run, but I was a mine of knowledge when I and the athlete and those two
notoriously gentlemanly boys--theirs was the name that I remember without
a face--set out for Richmond Park, for Coomb Wood or Twyford Abbey to look
for butterflies and moths and beetles. Sometimes to-day I meet people at
lunch or dinner whose address will sound familiar and I remember of a
sudden how a game-keeper chased me from the plantation behind their house,
and how I have turned over the cow-dung in their paddock in the search for
some rare beetle believed to haunt the spot. The athlete was our watchman
and our safety. He would suggest, should we meet a carriage on the drive,
that we take off our hats and walk on as though about to pay a call. And
once when we were sighted by a game-keeper at Coomb Wood, he persuaded the
eldest of the brothers to pretend to be a school-master taking his boys
for a walk, and the keeper, instead of swearing and threatening the law,
was sad and argumentative. No matter how charming the place, (and there is
a little stream in a hollow where Wimbledon Common flows into Coomb Wood
that is pleasant in the memory,) I knew that those other boys saw
something I did not see. I was a stranger there. There was something in
their way of saying the names of places that made me feel this.

X

When I arrived at the Clarence Basin, Liverpool, (the dock Clarence Mangan
had his first name from) on my way to Sligo for my holidays I was among
Sligo people. When I was a little boy, an old woma