rood upon gratefully in the darkness of the night when he lay awake and
when, alas, other stories less pleasant to recall would obtrude
themselves.

Mark was not brought up luxuriously in the Lima Street Mission House,
and the scarcity of toys stimulated his imagination. All his toys were
old and broken, because he was only allowed to have the toys left over
at the annual Christmas Tree in the Mission Hall; and since even the
best of toys on that tree were the cast-offs of rich little children
whose parents performed a vicarious act of charity in presenting them to
the poor, it may be understood that Mark's share of these was not
calculated to spoil him. His most conspicuous toy was a box of mutilated
grenadiers, whose stands had been melted by their former owner in the
first rapture of discovering that lead melts in fire and who in
consequence were only able to stand up uncertainly when stuck into
sliced corks.

Luckily Mark had better armies of his own in the coloured lines that
crossed the blankets of his bed. There marched the crimson army of St.
George, the blue army of St. Andrew, the green army of St. Patrick, the
yellow army of St. David, the rich sunset-hued army of St. Denis, the
striped armies of St. Anthony and St. James. When he lay awake in the
golden light of the morning, as golden in Lima Street as anywhere else,
he felt ineffably protected by the Seven Champions of Christendom; and
sometimes even at night he was able to think that with their bright
battalions they were still marching past. He used to lie awake,
listening to the sparrows and wondering what the country was like and
most of all the sea. His father would not let him go into the country
until he was considered old enough to go with one of the annual school
treats. His mother told him that the country in Cornwall was infinitely
more beautiful than Kensington Gardens, and that compared with the sea
the Serpentine was nothing at all. The sea! He had heard it once in a
prickly shell, and it had sounded beautiful. As for the country he had
read a story by Mrs. Ewing called _Our Field_, and if the country was
the tiniest part as wonderful as that, well . . . meanwhile Dora brought
him back from the greengrocer's a pot of musk, which Mark used to sniff
so enthusiastically that Dora said he would sniff it right away if he
wasn't careful. Later on when Lima Street was fetid in the August sun he
gave this pot of musk to a little girl with a broken le