he had told me to "shut it," only under sudden, excessive provocation,

and with, I am certain, a subsequent repentance; he was, I knew,

quite glad to be seen walking about the village with me. In due course,

he accepted the proposal of a pipe and whisky in my rooms readily

enough, and there, scenting by some happy instinct that there

was trouble of the heart in this, and knowing that confidences beget

confidences, I plied him with much of interest and suggestion from

my real and fictitious past. And it was after the third whisky

of the third visit of that sort, if I remember rightly, that a propos

of some artless expansion of a little affair that had touched and

left me in my teens, that he did at last, of his own free will

and motion, break the ice. "It was like that with me," he said,

"over there at Aldington. It's just that that's so rum. First I didn't

care a bit and it was all her, and afterwards, when it was too late,

it was, in a manner of speaking, all me."



I forbore to jump upon this allusion, and so he presently threw out

another, and in a little while he was making it as plain as daylight

that the one thing he wanted to talk about now was this Fairyland

adventure he had sat tight upon for so long. You see, I'd done

the trick with him, and from being just another half-incredulous,

would-be facetious stranger, I had, by all my wealth of shameless

self-exposure, become the possible confidant. He had been bitten

by the desire to show that he, too, had lived and felt many things,

and the fever was upon him.



He was certainly confoundedly allusive at first, and my eagerness

to clear him up with a few precise questions was only equalled

and controlled by my anxiety not to get to this sort of thing too soon.

But in another meeting or so the basis of confidence was complete;

and from first to last I think I got most of the items and aspects--

indeed, I got quite a number of times over almost everything that

Mr. Skelmersdale, with his very limited powers of narration, will

ever be able to tell. And so I come to the story of his adventure,

and I piece it all together again. Whether it really happened,

whether he imagined it or dreamt it, or fell upon it in some strange

hallucinatory trance, I do not profess to say. But that he invented

it I will not for one moment entertain. The man simply and honestly

believes the thing happened as he says it happened; he is transparently

incapable of any lie so elaborate and sustained, and in the belief

of the simple, yet often keenly penetrating, rustic minds about him

I find a very strong confirmation of his sincerity. He believes--

and nobody can produce any positive fact to falsify his belief.

As for me, with this much of endorsement, I transmit his story--

I am a little old now to justify or explain.



He says he went to sleep on Aldington Knoll about ten o'clock one

night--it was quite possibly Midsummer night, though he has never

thought of the date, and he cannot be sure within a week or so--

and it was a fine night and windless, with a rising moon. I have been



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