natural. From thenceforth for some
weeks--though he adroitly avoided giving any direct account of the
origin of these grisly imaginative freaks--many margins were adorned,
or rather defaced, by fancy portraits of that "foul and stalwart
ghaist" the Brownie of Badnock.

So did Dickie dwell, through all his childhood and the early years of
youth, in the dear land of dreams, petted, considered, sheltered with
perhaps almost cruel kindness, from the keen winds of truth that blow
forever across the world. Which winds, while causing all to suffer and
bringing death to the weak and fearful, to the lovers of lies and the
makers of them, go in the end to strengthen the strong who dare face
them, and fortify these in the acceptance of the only knowledge really
worth having--namely, the knowledge that romance is no exclusive
property of the past, or eternal life of the future, but that both
these are here immediately and actually for whoso has eyes to see and
courage to possess.

The fairest dreams are true. Yet it is so ordered that to know that we
must awake from them. And the awakening is an ugly process enough, too
often. When Dickie was about thirteen, the awakening began for him. It
came in time-honoured forms--those of horses and of a woman.

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH OUR HERO IMPROVES HIS ACQUAINTANCE WITH MANY THINGS--HIMSELF
INCLUDED

It came about in this wise. Roger Ormiston was expected at Brockhurst,
after an absence of some years. He had served with distinction in the
Sikh war; and had seen fighting on a grand scale in the battles of
Sobraon and Chillianwallah. Later, the restless genius of travel had
taken hold on him, leading him far eastward into China, and northward
across the Himalayan snows. He had dwelt among strange peoples and
looked on strange gods. He had hunted strange beasts, moreover, and
learnt their polity and their ways. He had seen the bewildering
fecundity of nature in the tropic jungle, and her barren and terrible
beauty in the out-stretch of the naked desert. And the thought of all
this set Dickie's imagination on fire. The return of Roger Ormiston
was, to him, as the return of the mighty Ulysses himself.

For a change was coming over the boy. He began to weary of fable and
cry out for fact. He had just entered his fourteenth year. He was
growing fast; and, but for that dwarfing deformity, would have been
unusually tall, graceful and well-proportioned. But along with this
increase of