ortuous
habit of body, that moves ever with a swish. Every morning, I swear,
thou readest avidly the list of male births in thy paper, and then are
thy hands rubbed gloatingly the one upon the other. 'Tis fear of thee
and thy gown and thy cane, which are part of thee, that makes the
fairies to hide by day; wert thou to linger but once among their haunts
between the hours of Lock-out and Open Gates there would be left not one
single gentle place in all the Gardens. The little people would flit.
How much wiser they than the small boys who swim glamoured to thy crafty
hook. Thou devastator of the Gardens, I know thee, Pilkington.

I first heard of Pilkington from David, who had it from Oliver Bailey.

This Oliver Bailey was one of the most dashing figures in the Gardens,
and without apparent effort was daily drawing nearer the completion
of his seventh year at a time when David seemed unable to get beyond
half-past five. I have to speak of him in the past tense, for gone is
Oliver from the Gardens (gone to Pilkington's) but he is still a name
among us, and some lordly deeds are remembered of him, as that his
father shaved twice a day. Oliver himself was all on that scale.

His not ignoble ambition seems always to have been to be wrecked upon
an island, indeed I am told that he mentioned it insinuatingly in his
prayers, and it was perhaps inevitable that a boy with such an outlook
should fascinate David. I am proud, therefore, to be able to state on
wood that it was Oliver himself who made the overture.

On first hearing, from some satellite of Oliver's, of Wrecked Islands,
as they are called in the Gardens, David said wistfully that he supposed
you needed to be very very good before you had any chance of being
wrecked, and the remark was conveyed to Oliver, on whom it made
an uncomfortable impression. For a time he tried to evade it, but
ultimately David was presented to him and invited gloomily to say
it again. The upshot was that Oliver advertised the Gardens of his
intention to be good until he was eight, and if he had not been wrecked
by that time, to be as jolly bad as a boy could be. He was naturally so
bad that at the Kindergarten Academy, when the mistress ordered whoever
had done the last naughty deed to step forward, Oliver's custom had been
to step forward, not necessarily because he had done it, but because he
presumed he very likely had.

The friendship of the two dated from this time, and at first I thoug