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

shirt-sleeves 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 my 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,

and that was by a cross-grained farm hand who was losing to him.

Skelmersdale had run a break into double figures, which, by the Bignor

standards, was uncommonly good play. "Steady on!" said his adversary.

"None of your fairy flukes!"



Skelmersdale stared at him for a moment, cue in hand, then flung

it down and walked out of the room.



"Why can't you leave 'im alone?" said a respectable elder who had

been enjoying the game, and in the general murmur of disapproval

the grin of satisfied wit faded from the ploughboy's face.



I scented my opportunity. "What's this joke," said I, "about Fairyland?"



"'Tain't no joke about Fairyland, not to young Skelmersdale," said

the respectable elder, drinking. A little man with rosy cheeks was

more communicative. "They DO say, sir," he said, "that they took him

into Aldington Knoll an' kep' him there a matter of three weeks."



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