She had been out one night to meet her sweetheart, and
as she was returning in the moonlight she was overtaken by a
multitude of little men, tiny little fellows in velvet coats and
cocked hats and pointed shoes, who ran after her, swarmed over her,
and clambered up her streaming hair.

[Illustration: GREEBA CASTLE, ISLE OF MAN, WHERE MR. CAINE WROTE MOST
OF "THE MANXMAN."
From a photograph by Abel Lewis, Douglas, Isle of Man.]

He was a precocious lad, and knew no greater delight than to read. The
first book that he remembers reading was a bulky tome on the German
Reformation, about Luther and Melancthon, which he had found. He spent
weeks over it, and, staggering under its weight, would carry it out
into the hayfield, where, truant to the harvest, he would lie behind
the stacks and read and read. One night, indeed, his interest in this
book led him to break the rules of his thrifty home--where children
went to bed when it was dark, so that candles should not be
burned--and light the candles and read on about Luther. He was found
thus by one of his aunts as, pails in hand, she returned home from
milking the cows. Her anger was great. "Candles lit!" she cried.
"What's to do? Candles! Wasting candles on reading, on mere reading!"
He was beaten and sent to bed, bursting with indignation at such
injustice, for he felt that candles were nothing compared to
knowledge. He was a bookish boy, wanting in boyishness, and never
played games, but spent his time in reading, not boyish books, indeed,
but books in which never boy before took interest--histories,
theological works, and, in preference, parliamentary speeches of the
great orators, which he would afterwards rewrite from memory. At a
very early age he showed a great passion for poetry and was a great
reader of Shakespeare. His talent for reading passages of Shakespeare
aloud was such that at the school at Liverpool, where he was educated,
his schoolmaster, George Gill, used to make him read aloud before all
the boys. This caused him great nervous agony, he says, and he
suffered horribly. He was a favorite pupil, and, in a school where
corporal punishment was inflicted with great severity, was never once
beaten. He left school at the age of fifteen and was apprenticed by
his father to John Murray, architect and land-surveyor. The lad had no
special faculties for architecture beyond possessing a fair knowledge
of drawing. When only thirteen he drew the map of England which