of crumbling into dust before him?  Assuredly he was a better man than Billy.  When, Billy duce et auspice Billy, the gang played at pirates or Red Indians, it was pitiful to watch their ignorant endeavours.  Paul, deeply read in the subject, gave them chapter and verse for his suggestions.  But they heeded him so little that he would turn away contemptuously, disdaining the travesty of the noble game, and dream of a gang of brighter spirits whom he could lead to glory.  Paul had many such dreams wherewith he sought to cheat the realities of existence:  but until the Great Happening the dream was not better than the drink:  after it came the Vision Splendid.

The wonderful thing happened all because Maisie Shepherd, a slip of a girl of nineteen, staying at St. Luke’s Vicarage, spilled a bottle of scent over her f rock.

It was the morning of the St. Luke’s annual Sunday-school treat.  The waggonette was at the vicarage door.  The vicar and his wife and daughter waited fussily for Maisie, an unpunctual damsel.  The vicar looked at his watch.  They were three minutes late, He tut-tutted impatiently.  The vicar’s daughter ran indoors in search of Maisie and pounced upon her as she sat on the edge of the bed in the act of perfuming a handkerchief.  The shock caused the bottle to slip mouth downward from her hand and empty the contents into her lap.  She cried out in dismay.

“Never mind,” said the vicar’s daughter.  “Come along.  Dad and mother are prancing about downstairs.”

“But I must change my dress!”

“You’ve no time.”

“I’m wet through.  This is the strongest scent known.  It’s twenty-six shillings a bottle, and one little drop is enough.  I shall be a walking pestilence.”

The vicar’s daughter laughed heartlessly.  “You do smell strong.  But you’ll disinfect Bludston, and that will be a good thing.”  Whereupon she dragged the tearful and redolent damsel from the room.

In the hard-featured yard of the schoolhouse the children were assembled-the girls on one side, the boys on the other.  Curates and teachers hovered about the intervening space.  Almost every child wore its Sunday best.  Even the shabbiest little girls had a clean white pinafore to hide deficiencies beneath, and the untidiest little boy showed a scrubbed face.  The majority of the boys wore clean collars; some grinned over gaudy neckties.  The only one who appeared in his week-day grime and tatterdemalion outfit was little Paul Kegworthy.  He had not changed his clothes, because he had no others; and he had not washed his face, because it had not occurred to him to do so.  Moreover, Mrs. Button had made no attempt to improve his forlorn aspect, for the simple reason that she had never heard of the Sunday-school treat.  It was part of Paul’s philosophy to dispense, as far as he could, with parental control.  On Sunday afternoons the little Buttons played in the streets, where Paul, had he so chosen, might have