He seemed so certainly to hear them that, just as they had done in his dream, they filled him with a sudden fire. Thoroughly aroused, he sat up in bed, grasping the bedclothes with eager hands. And to himself he said, half beneath his breath, "A life of adventure's the life for me!" The other boys were still asleep in the little iron bedsteads on either side of him, but he made no attempt to recompose himself to slumber. He remained sitting up in bed, his knees huddled up to his chin, engaged in a very unwonted act for him, the act of thinking. The events of the night before were vividly before him, but principally among them, a giant in the foreground, was the figure of Mr. George Washington Bankes. "Why don't you run away?" Mr. Bankes' question rang in his ears. "A life of adventure's the life for me!" Those other words of Mr. Bankes, which had been with him through the dream-haunted night, still danced before his eyes. Than Bertie Bailey a less romantic-looking youth one could scarce conceive. But history tells us that some of the greatest heroes of romance, real, live, flesh-and-blood heroes, who actually at some time or other did exist, were anything but romantic in their persons. Perhaps Bailey was one of these. Anyhow, stowed away in some out-of-the-way corner of his unromantic-looking person was a vein of romance of the most pronounced and unequivocal kind. His range of reading was not wide, yet he had his heroes of fiction none the less. They were rather a motley crew, and if he had been asked the question, say in an examination paper, "Who is your favourite hero? give a short sketch of his life," he would have hesitated once or twice before he would have written Dick Turpin, Robin Hood, Robinson Crusoe, or Jack the Giant-Killer. Perhaps he would have hesitated still longer before he had attempted to sketch the life of any one of them. Yet, had he told the truth, the gentleman selected would have been one of these. Possibly in the act of selection his greatest difficulty would have lain. He never could quite make up his mind which of the four gentlemen named above he liked the best. There were points about Dick Turpin which struck his fancy. He would rather have ridden that ride to York than have had ten thousand pounds. It would have been worth his while to have been Dick Turpin if only to possess that horse of horses, Black Bess, the coal-black steed of his heart's desire, though it may be mentioned in passing that up to the present moment Bertie Bailey had never figured upon a horse's back. He had once ridden a donkey from Ramsgate to Pegwell Bay, but a donkey was not Black Bess.