It must have been during one of these moods of the town that Jeremy was caught. He was, as all readers of these reminiscences of his early days will have discovered, a two-sided boy, and he had already a strange, secret interior life within his very healthy and normal exterior one. There is nothing harder, perhaps, in our own experience than to look back and discover when it was that that secret life was as it were first confirmed and strengthened by something in the real world that corresponded to it. For some of us that actual moment was so dramatic, so strangely concrete and definite, so friendly (as though it were someone suddenly appearing out of the dark and speaking to us and showing us that we were not alone, either in experience or desire as we had supposed) that we cannot possibly forget its precise time and colour. With others, two or three occasions can claim to have worked the miracle; with others again that confirmation was gradual, arising out of no definite incident, but rather creeping forward like a finger of the rising sun, slowly lighting one’s path and showing one where to go. With Jeremy there had been already definite signs—his adventure years ago with the sea captain, his days on the beach at Rafiel, his friendship with Uncle Samuel; but his actual realization of something strange and mysterious, ancient and yet present, friendly and yet hostile, reassuring and yet terrifying, active and yet quiescent, his recognition of “that life beyond the wall,” dated quite definitely from his discovery of Saladin and his strange adventure in the cathedral. As I have already said on that particular week—the last week of his Christmas holidays—the town was up to its tricks. Had it not been, Jeremy would surely never have felt the spirit of adventure so strongly, never gone into the old bookshop, never—but you shall hear. He was very quiet and behaving beautifully during that last week—yes, beautifully, until the last three days when the devil (who is always on the wait for young gentlemen when they are about to return to school), or the town, or Uncle Samuel or something or somebody suddenly got hold of him and led him the strangest dance. It must have been the devil that led to the adventure of the night raiders (and that is quite another story); but again it _might_ have been the old town—nobody knows. How can anybody know thirty years after it was all over and done with?