He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor¹ which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand² or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian³ fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic⁴ rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain⁵ him.

Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony⁶ fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed⁷. But since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge⁸ and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that the skull⁹ bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it with some chivalry¹⁰ almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips triumphantly¹¹. The skull swung to and fro, for the house, at the top of which he lived, was so vast that there seemed trapped in it the wind itself, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter and summer. The green arras with the hunters on it moved perpetually. His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic