illy. When, Billy duce et auspice
Billy, the gang played at pirates or Red Indians, it was pitiful to
watch their ignorant endeavours. Paul, deeply read in the subject, gave
them chapter and verse for his suggestions. But they heeded him so
little that he would turn away contemptuously, disdaining the travesty
of the noble game, and dream of a gang of brighter spirits whom he
could lead to glory. Paul had many such dreams wherewith he sought to
cheat the realities of existence: but until the Great Happening the
dream was not better than the drink: after it came the Vision Splendid.

The wonderful thing happened all because Maisie Shepherd, a slip of a
girl of nineteen, staying at St. Luke's Vicarage, spilled a bottle of
scent over her f rock.

It was the morning of the St. Luke's annual Sunday-school treat. The
waggonette was at the vicarage door. The vicar and his wife and
daughter waited fussily for Maisie, an unpunctual damsel. The vicar
looked at his watch. They were three minutes late, He tut-tutted
impatiently. The vicar's daughter ran indoors in search of Maisie and
pounced upon her as she sat on the edge of the bed in the act of
perfuming a handkerchief. The shock caused the bottle to slip mouth
downward from her hand and empty the contents into her lap. She cried
out in dismay.

"Never mind," said the vicar's daughter. "Come along. Dad and mother
are prancing about downstairs."

"But I must change my dress!"

"You've no time."

"I'm wet through. This is the strongest scent known. It's twenty-six
shillings a bottle, and one little drop is enough. I shall be a walking
pestilence."

The vicar's daughter laughed heartlessly. "You do smell strong. But
you'll disinfect Bludston, and that will be a good thing." Whereupon
she dragged the tearful and redolent damsel from the room.

In the hard-featured yard of the schoolhouse the children were
assembled-the girls on one side, the boys on the other. Curates and
teachers hovered about the intervening space. Almost every child wore
its Sunday best. Even the shabbiest little girls had a clean white
pinafore to hide deficiencies beneath, and the untidiest little boy
showed a scrubbed face. The majority of the boys wore clean collars;
some grinned over gaudy neckties. The only one who appeared in his
week-day grime and tatterdemalion outfit was little Paul Kegworthy. He
had not changed his clothes, because he had no others; and he had not
washed his face, because i