uniform. At the same time, although I made no friends, I found no
enemies. In class, except in my extraordinary aptitude for
geography, which was looked upon as incomprehensible and almost
uncanny, I was rather behind than in front of the others. I,
therefore, awakened no jealousies, and, intent on my own dreams,
I think my little shadowy presence escaped the notice of most of
my schoolfellows.

By the side of the road I have mentioned, between the school and
my home, there was a large horse-pond. The hedge folded around
three sides of it, while ancient pollard elms bent over it, and
chequered with their foliage in it the reflection of the sky. The
roadside edge of this pond was my favourite station; it consisted
of a hard clay which could be moulded into fairly tenacious
forms. Here I created a maritime empire--islands, a seaboard with
harbours, light-houses, fortifications. My geographical
imitativeness had its full swing. Sometimes, while I was
creating, a cart would be driven roughly into the pond, and a
horse would drink deep of my ocean, his hooves trampling my
archipelagoes and shattering my ports with what was worse than a
typhoon. But I immediately set to work, as soon as the cart was
gone and the mud had settled, to tidy up my coastline again and
to scoop out anew my harbours.

My pleasure in this sport was endless, and what I was able to
see, in my mind's eye, was not the edge of a morass of mud, but a
splendid line of coast, and gulfs of the type of Tor Bay. I do
not recollect a sharper double humiliation than when old Sam
Lamble, the blacksmith, who was one of the 'saints', being asked
by my Father whether he had met me, replied 'Yes, I zeed 'un up-
long, making mud pies in the ro-ad!' What a position for one who
had been received into communion 'as an adult'! What a blot on
the scutcheon of a would-be Columbus! 'Mud-pies', indeed!

Yet I had an appreciator. One afternoon, as I was busy on my
geographical operations, a good-looking middle-aged lady, with a
soft pink cheek and a sparkling hazel eye, paused and asked me if
my name was not what it was. I had seen her before; a stranger to
our parts, with a voice without a trace in it of the Devonshire
drawl. I knew, dimly, that she came sometimes to the meeting,
that she was lodging at Upton with some friends of ours who
accepted paying guests in an old house that was simply a basket
of roses. She was Miss Brightwen, and I now conversed with her
for the