ther side. Just there the road swerved, and I could hear a
halting footstep coming. Somehow, the Dudley Devil was associated in my
mind with that halting step, and there was I, in the middle of a waste
universe, in which all the bird voices had suddenly grown silent, and
the companionable insects had ceased to hum and flutter, left to await
the coming of this awful creature. The stammering step came round the
bend of the lane, and I saw for the first time a person whom I grew to
respect and pity later on, but who struck me then with such an abject
sense of terror as I have sometimes since experienced in dreams.

One might have travelled far before meeting a more harmless creature.
He was on the local Plan of the Wesleyan Methodists, as I found out
afterwards. He had been a metal-worker of some sort, and the victim of
an explosion which had wrecked one side of his face and figure, and had
made nothing less than a ghastly horror of him. The upward-flying stream
of metal had struck him on the cheek and chin, and had left him writhen
and distorted there almost beyond imagination. It had literally boiled
one eye, which revolved amid its facial seams dead-white in a sightless
orbit. The sideward and downward streams had left him with a dangling
atrophied arm and a scalded hip, so that he came down on me, with my
preconceived ideas about him, like an actual lop-sided demon. I let
out one screech, and fled; but even in the act of flight I saw the
poor fellow's face, and read in it the bitter regret he felt that the
disaster which had befallen him should have made him unbearable to the
imagination of a child.

A great many years after, when I was quite a young man, and was invited
to read a paper on "Liberty" before a society of earnest Wes-leyan
youths who called themselves the "Young Bereans," this identical man
stood up to take a part in the discussion, and I knew him in a flash.
He began his speech by saying something about the inscrutable designs of
Providence, and I recall even now some fragmentary idea of the words he
used. "I was a handsome lad to begin with," he said, "but God saw fit to
deform me, and to make me what I am." And now, when I am settling down
to these reminiscences in late middle age, the most dreadful waking
sense of real horror, and the first real touch of human pity, seem to
meet each other, and to blend.

It is fully half a century ago, for I could not have been quite six
years of age, when my broth