"I am a fool to think anything of a dream," I told myself angrily, trying to thrust away from me the grey spectre of Fear that had risen up before me suddenly in the pale winter sunlight. "After all, what is a dream? It's a thing that never comes to a person in perfect health--except once in a way, when one happens to be awakened about half an hour before one's proper time and then goes off into a doze. And then, there is Little Yeogh Wough's lucky white lock. That will keep him from being killed. He will get badly wounded, I dare say, but not killed--no, certainly, not killed." I have not mentioned the boy's lucky white lock of hair before. It was a queer little white patch in among the gold, just over his left ear. It was Gretton who, when they went to school first, had called Little Yeogh Wough a sixpenny-halfpenny Golliwog. "That comes of doin' things by 'alves with Master Roland's 'air," Old Nurse had ventured to air her opinions. "What I do say is, if you've got to cut a boy's curls off, why, you'd better cut 'em off, and not 'ave bits of 'em left 'anging. Of course, it's a shame, but boys 'as got to be boys, and you can't 'ave 'em goin' to school lookin' like them little Cupids in the pictures." "It's true that an aureole of golden curls doesn't look very well coming out from under a bowler hat," I said to myself. Have you ever noticed that there's hardly one grown-up man in a hundred that can ever look decent in a bowler? A man has either to be very neat-featured or else very ugly to carry off that sort of hat. "Them there bowlers is all the go for little boys of Master Roland's age, and 'is suits 'im right enough, only 'e chooses to think as it don't, and you listens to 'im," went on the worthy old woman. "'Pon my word, that there boy's vanity do beat anything I ever come across in all my life. Every time that I makes 'im put that bowler on, 'e gets into such a temper as you never saw. 'E thinks as people laughs at 'im for it, but if they does laugh, it's at 'is fatness, not at his 'at." "That's because all the rest of them are such skeletons," I rejoined. "Any boy with any flesh on his bones at all would look fat compared with them. People are so silly about thinness and fatness. They always think of what they look like dressed, and never of what they look like undressed. Why, half the women who go about with a reputation for slimness and elegance would give one a start if one saw their blade bones uncovered! And it's the same with children." "That may be, ma'am, but it don't do away with the fact that these children is all so enormous that people opens their eyes wide whenever they sees 'em a-comin'. As for Master Roland, I've given 'im up. 'E 'ad the coolness to say to me to-day as my 'air was going greyer. I told 'im that at my time of life people 'as either to 'ave their 'air go grey or else come off, and they aren't given their choice."