through the mare's lips, and its hollow glug as it went down, and
the creak of the saddle beneath Turpin's hip; he saw the smear of sweat
roughening the hair on her slanting neck, and the great steaming breath
she blew out when she rested from drinking, and then that awful face
glaring from the pool.--Perhaps he was not so far from being the right
kind of boy, after all, since that was the stuff that _he_ liked. He
wished he had some Turpin with him now, for his mother's periodicals
were all about men with impossibly broad shoulders and impossibly curved
waists who asked Angelina if she loved them. Once, it is true, a
somewhat too florid sentence touched him on the visual nerve: "Through
a chink in the Venetian blind a long pencil of yellow light pierced the
beautiful dimness of the room and pointed straight to the dainty bronze
slipper peeping from under Angelina's gown; it became a slipper of vivid
gold amid the gloom." John saw that and brightened, but the next moment
they began to talk about love and he was at sea immediately. "Dagon them
and their love!" quoth he.

To him, indeed, reading was never more than a means of escape from
something else; he never thought of a book so long as there were things
to see. Some things were different from others, it is true. Things of
the outer world, where he swaggered among his fellows and was thrashed,
or bungled his lessons and was thrashed again, imprinted themselves
vividly on his mind, and he hated the impressions. When Swipey Broon was
hot the sweat pores always glistened distinctly on the end of his
mottled nose--John, as he thought angrily of Swipey this afternoon, saw
the glistening sweat pores before him and wanted to bash them. The
varnishy smell of the desks, the smell of the wallflowers at Mrs.
Manzie's on the way to school, the smell of the school itself--to all
these he was morbidly alive, and he loathed them. But he loved the
impressions of his home. His mind was full of perceptions of which he
was unconscious, till he found one of them recorded in a book, and that
was the book for him. The curious physical always drew his mind to hate
it or to love. In summer he would crawl into the bottom of an old hedge,
among the black mould and the withered sticks, and watch a red-ended
beetle creep slowly up a bit of wood till near the top, and fall
suddenly down, and creep patiently again--this he would watch with
curious interest and remember always. "Johnny," said his mo