erable enrichments, and obviously he knew it.
He has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish world
of much too intensely appreciated Characters.

He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port wine.
Of other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no "special knowledge."
Beyond these things he had little pride except that he claimed to have
read every novel by a woman writer that had ever entered the Union
Library. This, however, he held to be remarkable rather than ennobling,
and such boasts as he made of it were tinged with playfulness. Certainly
he had a scholar's knowledge of the works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss
Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and Madame Sarah Grand that would have
astonished and flattered those ladies enormously, and he loved nothing
so much in his hours of relaxation as to propound and answer difficult
questions upon their books. Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival
in this field, their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious
for Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook
to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the
changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain by
the nearest and cheapest routes....

Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta
Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable Character in
the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly absurd anecdotes.
He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to her plausible
expressions of opinion entirely identical in import with those of the
Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscure
war....

It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the
intimate wisdom of things. He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff like
nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with itself. It
was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active childish brain
that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor feared nor passionately
loved,--a web of iridescent threads. He had luminous final theories
about Love and Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for him to
think about! and all his woven thoughts lay across my perception of the
realities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful,
oh!--as a dew-wet spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the
black mouth of a gun....

4

All through those years o