ith the nervous strain of his race and all the little bluntnesses of a
boy ungently reared, might prove the prey of circumstance; or whether,
after all, he might not so build up resisting power as to make a fair
thing of his life. A no more distant future than the next hour held
Ishmael's mind at the moment, and attracted by a strong smell of
peppermint from the marsh, the child turned that way, to add the pale
purple blossoms to his fast-wilting bunch.

A man in a black cassock, looped up for convenience in walking by a
shabby cincture, was wandering among the brambles and gorse bushes,
peering short-sightedly here and there, and as Ishmael appeared the
man's hand closed suddenly over some object on a leaf. Ishmael had
hardly recognised the Parson before he himself was seen.

"Come and look at what I've got here," shouted Boase, straightening his
long back and holding his curved-out hands aloft. Ishmael ran towards
him, the tussocks, dry from long drought, swaying and sagging beneath
him. As he drew near he caught a whirring sound, so strong as to seem
metallic, and saw a big green and yellow dragon-fly fighting in the
Parson's hands. Boase took hold of it carefully but firmly by the wings,
and the creature stared angrily at Ishmael with its huge glassy green
eyes, opening its oddly-fleshy mouth and wagging its fawn-coloured lips
like an evil infant cockatrice.

Suddenly the Parson launched it in the air again, raising two fingers in
whimsical blessing, then he looked down at Ishmael with a queer
expression in his eyes. That was Ishmael's fate, of which he was as yet
unconscious--no one looked at him absolutely naturally. His mother saw
him with aversion, Archelaus with resentment, and the younger brothers
and the little sister took their cue from their elders. The neighbouring
gentry treated him with an embarrassed kindness when they met him with
Parson Boase, and solved the problem by leaving him alone on other
occasions; the farmers looked at him as though he embodied a huge joke,
and their wives mothered him surreptitiously, giving him saffron-cake,
which he loved, and quick, hard kisses, which he detested. Even Boase
looked at him not only as a child whom he loved, but as the incarnation
of a hope, a theory--in short, as an Experiment. Nevertheless, it was
the Parson to whom Ishmael came with his pleasures, and for all the
intuition which told him the child went to no one in his griefs Boase
had not quite enough