inappropriate juxtaposition of an early Victorian
tomb shocked him with a sense of sacrilege. He could not bear to
contemplate the nautical trousers of the boy commemorated. Yet,
simultaneously with his outraged decorum, he was attracted to this
tomb, as if he detected in that ingenuous boy posited among sad cherubs
some kinship with himself.

In bed that night Michael read The Ingoldsby Legends in a fever of
enjoyment, while the shadows waved about the ceiling and walls of the
seaside room in the vexed candlelight. As yet the details of the poems
did not gain their full effect, because many of the words and references
were not understood. He felt that knowledge was necessary before he
could properly enjoy the colour of these tales. Michael had always been
inclined to crystallize in one strong figure of imagination his vague
impressions. Two years ago he had identified Mr. Neech with old prints,
with Tom Brown's Schooldays and with shelves of calf-bound books. Now in
retrospect he, without being able to explain his reason to himself,
identified Mr. Neech with that statue of the trousered boy in
Christchurch Priory, and not merely Mr. Neech but even The Ingoldsby
Legends as well. He felt that they were both all wrong in the sanctified
glooms of the Middle Ages, and yet he rejoiced to behold them there, as
if somehow they were a pledge of historic continuity. Without the
existence of the trousered boy Michael would scarcely have believed in
the reality of those stone ladies and carved knights. The candlelight
fluttered and jigged in the seaside room, while Mr. Neech, The Ingoldsby
Legends and the oratories of Christchurch became more and more
hopelessly confused. Michael's excited brain was formulating visions of
immense cathedrals beneath whose arches pattered continually the
populations of old prints: the tower of St. Mary's College, Oxford,
rose, slim and lovely, against the storm-wrack of a Dore sky: Don
Quixote tilted with knights-at-arms risen from the dead. Michael himself
was swept along in cavalcades towards the clouds with Ivanhoe, Richard
Coeur de Lion, Roderick Random and half a dozen woodcut murderers
from the Newgate Calendar. Then, just as the candlelight was gasping and
shimmering blue in the bowl of the candlestick, he fell asleep.

In the sunshine of the next day Michael almost wondered whether like
someone in The Ingoldsby Legends he had ridden with witches on a
broomstick. All the cool security of boy