oasted elephant's tongue--by the uninitiated mistakable for
jumbles--there would break upon our trained hunters' ear the hungry
lion or tiger's distant roar, mingled with the melancholy, long-drawn
growling of the Polar Bear, growing ever in volume and impatience until
half-past four precisely; and we would snatch our rifles, and
with stealthy tread and every sense alert make our way through the
jungle--until stopped by the spiked fencing round the Zoological
Gardens?) I feel sure it was you, in spite of your side whiskers and the
greyness and the thinness of your once clustering golden locks. You were
hurrying down Throgmorton Street chained to a small black bag. I should
have stopped you, but that I had no time to spare, having to catch a
train at Liverpool Street and to get shaved on the way. I wonder if
you recognised me: you looked at me a little hard, I thought. Gallant,
kindly hearted Shamus, you who fought once for half an hour to save
a frog from being skinned; they tell me you are now an Income Tax
assessor; a man, it is reported, with power of disbelief unusual among
even Inland Revenue circles; of little faith, lacking in the charity
that thinketh no evil. May Providence direct you to other districts than
to mine.

So Time, Nature's handy-man, bustles to and fro about the many rooms,
making all things tidy, covers with sweet earth the burnt volcanoes,
turns to use the debris of the ages, smoothes again the ground above the
dead, heals again the beech bark marred by lovers.

In the beginning I was far from being a favourite with my schoolmates,
and this was the first time trouble came to dwell with me. Later, we men
and women generally succeed in convincing ourselves that whatever else
we may have missed in life, popularity in a greater or less degree
we have at all events secured, for without it altogether few of us, I
think, would care to face existence. But where the child suffers keener
than the man is in finding himself exposed to the cold truth without the
protecting clothes of self-deception. My ostracism was painfully plain
to me, and, as was my nature, I brooded upon it in silence.

"Can you run?" asked of me one day a most important personage whose name
I have forgotten. He was head of the Lower Fourth, a tall youth with a
nose like a beak, and the manner of one born to authority. He was the
son of a draper in the Edgware Road, and his father failing, he had
to be content for a niche in life with