scale at home. Paul, who had read of suicide in The Bludston
Herald, turned his thoughts morbidly to death. But his dramatic
imagination always carried him beyond' his own demise to the scene in
the household when his waxlike corpse should be discovered dangling
from a rope fixed to the hook in the kitchen ceiling. He posed
cadaverous before a shocked Budge Street, before a conscience-stricken
factory; and he wept on his sack bed in the scullery because the prince
and the princess, his august parents, would never know that he had
died. A whit less gloomy were his imaginings of the said prince and
princess rushing into the house, in the nick of time, just before life
was extinct, and cutting him down. How they were to find him he did not
know. This side-track exploration of possibilities was a symptom of
sanity.

Yet, Heaven knows what would have happened to Paul, after a year or so
at the factory, if Barney Bill, a grotesque god from the wide and
breezy spaces of the world, had not limped into his life.

Barney Bill wore the cloth cap and conventional and unpicturesque,
though shapeless and weather-stained, garment of the late nineteenth
century. Neither horns nor goat's feet were visible; nor was the pipe
of reed on which he played. Yet he played, in Paul's ear, the
comforting melody of Pan, and the glory of the Vision once more flooded
Paul's senses, and the factory and Budge Street and the Buttons and the
scullery faded away like an evil dream.

CHAPTER III

THE Fates arranged Barney Bill's entrance late on a Saturday afternoon
in August. It was not dramatic. It was merely casual. They laid the
scene in the brickfield.

It had rained all day, and now there was sullen clearance. Paul, who
had been bathing with some factory boys in the not very savoury canal a
mile or so distant, had wandered mechanically to his brickfield
library, which, by means of some scavenging process, he managed to keep
meagrely replenished. Here he had settled himself with a dilapidated
book on his knees for an hour's intellectual enjoyment. It was not a
cheerful evening. The ground was sodden, and rank emanations rose from
the refuse. From where he sat he could see an angry sunset like a
black-winged dragon with belly of flame brooding over the town. The
place wore an especial air of desolation. Paul felt depressed. Bathing
in the pouring wet is a chilly sport, and his midday meal of cold
potatoes had not been invigorating. These he