it is to read—took me to Bignor. I lodged at a farmhouse, and presently found myself outside that little general shop again, in search of tobacco. 'Skelmersdale,' said I to myself at the sight of it, and went in .
I was served by a short, but shapely, young man, with a fair downy complexion, good, small teeth, blue eyes, and a languid manner. I scrutinised him curiously. Except for a touch of melancholy in his expression, he was nothing out of the common. He was in the shirtsleeves and tucked-up apron of his trade, and a pencil was thrust behind his inoffensive ear. Athwart his black waistcoat was a gold chain, from which dangled a bent guinea.
'Nothing more to-day, sir?' he inquired. He leant forward over my bill as he spoke.
'Are you Mr Skelmersdale?' said I.
'I am, sir,' he said, without looking up.
'Is it true that you have been in Fairyland?' He looked up at me for a moment with wrinkled brows, with an aggrieved, exasperated face. 'O shut it!' he said, and, after a moment of hostility, eye to eye, he went on adding up my bill. 'Four, six and a half,' he said, after a pause. 'Thank you, sir.'
So, unpropitiously, my acquaintance with Mr Skelmersdale began.
Well, I got from that to confidence—through a series of toilsome efforts. I picked him up again in the Village Room, where of a night I went to play billiards after my supper, and mitigate the extreme seclusion from mv kind that was so helpful to work during the day. I contrived to play with him and afterwards to talk with him. I found the one subject to avoid was Fairyland. On everything else he was open and amiable in a commonplace sort of way, but on that he had been worried—it was a manifest taboo. Only once in the room did I hear the slightest allusion to his experience in his presence,
