It was six o’clock of a cold September morning when Sir Robert—or Mr. Tuke, as we must now know him—woke in his room off the stable-yard of the old “George” inn at Winchester. Lying lazily snoozed amongst the pillows, he reviewed, with some amused satisfaction, the first courses of that scheme of reformation he had mapped out for himself, whereof two rather sleepless¹ nights at Farnham and his present quarters—the result of an abstention in the matter of numerous “nightcaps,” which habit had made necessary to slumber—were the prologue². Now, the little battle fought and won, he preened³ his moral feathers smugly, and felt clear-eyed and very good indeed. As to the mysterious estate—the last stage on the journey to which he should cover that day—he had soon learned to accept its acquisition with that sweetness of irresponsibility that was his most engaging and aggravating⁴ characteristic. But, after all, he had an excellent digestion—in common with a great many men of the eighteenth century—and was little inclined to dyspeptic brooding over problems.

 

Now, as he lay, his half-dreaming glance was arrested by a coloured print after George Morland hanging on the wall over against him. The like he remembered dimly to have known in a nursery of long ago—a picture that had often set his young soul wandering by lanes of enchantment⁵. Nothing could have served better to confirm and make abiding⁶ his present mood. He was a boy again, an apple-skinned Ulysses, with the limitless possibilities of the unknown before him. Without stain or guile⁷ he passed beyond the narrow margins⁸ of the print into a land that no mortal foot but his own had yet trodden.

 

Indeed, for the moment he was a child again, and there is nothing in after-life like the pure imaginings of such. To the child every incident is a picture framed and hung upon a wall. The memory of these pictures

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