ked to encounter
a fairy in these most fairy solitudes. Beleaguered ladies,
knights-errant, dwarfs, churls, fiends of hell, leaping like flames
out of pits in the ground: all these, but no fairies. It's very odd
that having seen the reality and devoured the fictitious, I should
have had zest for neither, but so it is.

As for my school-mates, though I had very little to say to them, or
they to me, I used to watch them very closely, and, as I have said,
came to weave them into my dreams. Some figured as heroes, some as
magnanimous allies, some as malignant enemies, some who struck me as
beautiful received of me the kind of idolatry, the insensate
self-surrender which creatures of my sort have always offered up to
beauty of any sort. I remember T----e, a very shapely and
distinguished youth. I worshipped him as a god, and have seen him
since--alas! I remember B---- also, a tall, lean, loose-limbed young
man. He was a great cricketer, a good-natured, sleepy giant, perfectly
stupid (I am sure) but with marks of breed about him which I could not
possibly mistake. Him, too, I enthroned upon my temple-frieze; he
would have figured there as Meleager had I been a few years older. As
it was, he rode a blazoned charger, all black, and feutred his lance
with the Knights of King Arthur's court. Then there was H----n, a
good-looking, good-natured boy, and T----r, another. Many and many a
day did they ride forth with me adventuring--that is, spiritually they
did so; physically speaking, I had no scot or lot with them. We were
in plate armour, visored and beplumed. We slung our storied shields
behind us; we had our spears at rest; we laughed, told tales, sang as
we went through the glades of the forest, down the rutted
charcoal-burner's track, and came to the black mere, where there lay a
barge with oars among the reeds. I can see, now, H----n throw up his
head, bared to the sky and slanting sun. He had thick and dark curly
hair and a very white neck. His name of chivalry was Sagramor. T----r
was of stouter build and less salient humour. He was Bors, a brother
of Lancelot's. I, who was moody, here as in waking life, was Tristram,
more often Tramtris.

Of other more sinister figures I remember two. R----s, who bullied me
until I was provoked at last into facing him; a greedy, pale,
lecherous boy, graceless, a liar, but extremely clever. I had a horror
of him which endures now. If he, as I have, had a dweller in the deeps
of him, his