must have been a satyr. I cannot doubt it now. Disastrous
ally for mortal man! Vice sat upon his face like a grease; vice made
his fingers quick. He had a lickorous tongue and a taste for sweet
things which even then made me sick. So repulsive was he to me, so
impressed upon my fancy, that it was curious he did not haunt my inner
life. But I never met him there. No shape of his ever encountered me
in the wilds and solitary places. In the manifest world he afflicted
me to an extent which the rogue-fairy in the wood could never have
approached. Perhaps it was that all my being was forearmed against
him, and that I fought him off. At any rate he never trespassed in my
preserves.

The other was R----d, a bleared and diseased creature, a thing of pity
and terror to the wholesome, one of those outcasts of the world which
every school has to know and reckon with. A furtive, nail-bitten,
pick-nose wretch with an unholy hunger for ink, earth-worms and the
like. What terrible tenant do the likes of these carry about with
them! He, too, haunted me, but not fearfully; but he, too, I now
understand too well, was haunted and ridden to doom. I pitied him,
tried to be kind to him, tried to treat him as the human thing which
in some sort he was. I discovered that when he was interested he
forgot his loathsome cravings, and became almost lovable. I went home
with him once, to a mean house in ----. He took me into the backyard
and showed me his treasury--half a dozen rabbits, as many guinea-pigs,
and a raven with a bald head. He was all kindness to these prisoners,
fondled them with hands and voice, spoke a kind of inarticulate baby
language to them, and gave them pet names. He forgot his misery, his
poverty--I remember that he never had a handkerchief and always wanted
one, that his jacket-sleeves were near his elbow, and that his wrist
bones were red and broken. But now there shone a clear light in his
eye; he could face the world as he spoke to me of the habits of his
friends. We got upon some sort of terms by these means, and I always
had a kind of affection for poor R----d. In a sense we were both
outcasts, and might have warmed the world for each other. If I had not
been so entirely absorbed in my private life as to grudge any moment
of it unnecessarily spent I should have asked him home. But boys are
exorbitant in their own affairs, and I had no time to spare him.

I was a year at ---- before I got so far with any schoolfellow of