On the other hand, there was no part of England with which he was better acquainted--theoretically--than the glades of Sherwood Forest. To have lived in those glades with Robin Hood, Bailey would heave a great sigh at the prospect; ah, that he only could! Yet certainly one had only to speak of the desert island, and of Robinson Crusoe on its lonely shore, for Bertie to feel a wild longing to plough the distant main, a longing which was scarcely consistent with his desire for the glades of Sherwood Forest. It is the fashion to sneer at fairy tales, and to speak of them as though they were beneath the supposititious dignity of the common noun boy, and certainly the marvellous history and adventures of Jack the Giant-Killer belong to the domain of the fairies. Possibly Bertie would have been himself ashamed to own his partiality for that hero of the nursery; and yet, to have had Jack's courage and strength and skill, to have slaughtered giants and taken castles and rescued maidens--Bertie sometimes dreamt of himself as another Jack, and then always with a rapture too deep for words. Perhaps his real, ideal, and favourite hero would have consisted of a judicious combination of the four--something of Dick Turpin, and something of Robin Hood, and something of Robinson Crusoe, and something of Jack the Giant-Killer. Take all these somethings and mix them well together, and you would have had the man for Bailey. Emphatically, although almost unconsciously, in all his waking dreams, a life of adventure had been the life for him. Mr. George Washington Bankes had applied the match to the powder. As he thought of all that gentleman had said, even in the cool of the morning, all his soul was on fire. Seeing him in his nightshirt of doubtful cleanliness, and with his touzled hair, you might not have supposed that there was fire in his soul, but there was. Run away! He had heard of boys running away from school before to-day. Boys had run away from Mecklemburg House, and there were stories of one who, within quite recent times, had made a dash for liberty. Some said he had got as far as Windsor, some said Dorking, before he had changed his mind and decided to come back again. But he had come back again. Bailey made up his mind that when he ran away he would never come back again; never! or, at any rate, not till he had traversed the world in several different directions, as Mr. George Washington Bankes had done. It had already become a question of _when_ he ran away. With that quickness in arriving at a decision which, so some tell us, is the sure sign of a commanding intellect, he had already decided that he would; there only remained the question of time and opportunity. "Why don't you run away?" Mr. Bankes had asked. Yes, why, indeed? especially if one had only to run away to step at once into the Land of Golden Dreams!