y childhood so unhappy. I heard, the boys breathing softly around
me--those wonderful boys who could sleep even when they were
excited--and I felt that I was getting the better of them in thinking
while they slept. I remembered the prefect who had told me that we
were there only for a spell, but I did not speculate as to what
would follow afterwards. All that I had to do was to watch myself
ceaselessly, and be able to explain to myself everything that I felt
I and did. In that way I should always be strong I enough to guard
my weaknesses from the eyes of the jealous world in which I moved.

The church bells chimed the hour, and I turned over and went to
sleep.

On the Brighton Road

Slowly the sun had climbed up the hard white downs, till it broke
with little of the mysterious ritual of dawn upon a sparkling world
of snow. There had been a hard frost during the night, and the birds,
who hopped about here and there with scant tolerance of life, left no
trace of their passage on the silver pavements. In places the
sheltered caverns of the hedges broke the monotony of the whiteness
that had fallen upon the coloured earth, and overhead the sky melted
from orange to deep blue, from deep blue to a blue so pale that it
suggested a thin paper screen rather than illimitable space. Across
the level fields there came a cold, silent wind which blew a fine
dust of snow from the trees, but hardly stirred the crested hedges.
Once above the skyline, the sun seemed to climb more quickly, and as
it rose higher it began to give out a heat that blended with the
keenness of the wind.

It may have been this strange alternation of heat and cold that
disturbed the tramp in his dreams, for he struggled tor a moment with
the snow that covered him, like a man who finds himself twisted
uncomfortably in the bed-clothes, and then sat up with staring,
questioning eyes. "Lord! I thought I was in bed," he said to himself
as he took in the vacant landscape, "and all the while I was out
here." He stretched his limbs, and, rising carefully to his feet,
shook the snow off his body. As he did so the wind set him shivering,
and he knew that his bed had been warm.

"Come, I feel pretty fit," he thought. "I suppose I am lucky to wake
at all in this. Or unlucky--it isn't much of a business to come back
to." He looked up and saw the downs shining against the blue, like
the Alps on a picture-postcard. "That means another forty miles or
so, I suppose,