ll.
With untiring patience he answered, to the best of his ability,
Dickie's endless questions, of how and why. And, perhaps, he learned
even more than he taught, under this fire of cross-examination. He had
never come intimately in contact with a child's mind before; and
Dickie's daring speculations and suggestions opened up very surprising
vistas at times. The boy was a born adventurer; a gaily audacious
sceptic moreover, notwithstanding his large swallow for romance, until
his own morsel of reason and sense of dramatic fitness were satisfied.

And so, having once apprehended that idea of payment, he searched for
justification of it instinctively in all he saw and read. He found it
again in the immortal story of the siege of Troy, and in the long
wanderings and manifold trials of that most experimental of
philosophers, the great Ulysses. He found it too in more modern and
more authentic history--in the lives of Galileo and Columbus, of Sir
Walter Raleigh and many another hero and heroine, of whom, because of
some unusual excellence of spirit or attainment, their fellow-men, and,
as it would seem, the very gods themselves, have grown jealous, not
enduring to witness a beauty rivalling or surpassing their own.

The idea was all confused as yet, coloured by childish fancies,
instinctive merely, not realised. Yet it occupied a very actual place
in the little boy's mind. He lingered over it silently, caressing it,
returning to it again and again in half-frightened delight. It lent a
fascination, somewhat morbid perhaps, to all ill-favoured and unsightly
creatures--to blind worms and slow-moving toads; to trapped cats and
dusty, disabled, winter flies; to a winged sea-gull, property of
Bushnell, one of the under-gardeners, that paced, picking up loathsome
living in the matter of slugs and snails, about the cabbage beds, all
the tragedy of its lost power of flight and of the freedom of the sea
in its wild, pale eyes.

It further provoked Dickie to expend all his not inconsiderable gift of
draughtsmanship, in the production of long processions of half-human
monsters of a grotesque and essentially uncomfortable character. He
scribbled these upon all available pieces of paper, including the
fly-leaves of Todhunter's Arithmetic, and of his Latin and Greek
primers. In an evil hour, for the tidiness of his school-books, he came
across the ballad of "Aiken-Drum," with its rather terrible mixture of
humour, realism, and the super