As I passed the patient, humble beasts of common experience--a carter's team nodding, jingling its brasses, a donkey, patient, humble, hobbled in a paddock, dogs sniffing each other, a cat tucked into a cottage window, I mused doubtfully and often whether we had touched the threshold of the heart of their mystery. But for the most part, being constitutionally timid, I was resolute to put the experience out of mind. When next I chanced to go through the wood there is no doubt I peered askance to right and left among the trees; but I took good care not to desert my companions. That which I had seen was unaccountable, therefore out of bounds. But though I never saw him there again I have never forgotten him. HARKNESS'S FANCY I may have been a precocious child, but I cannot tell within a year or two how soon it was that I attained manhood. There must have been a moment of time when I clothed myself in skins, like Adam; when I knew what this world calls good and evil--by which this world means nothing more nor less than men and women, and chiefly women, I think. Savage peoples initiate their young and teach them the taboos of society by stripes. We allow our issue to gash themselves. By stripes, then, upon my young flesh, I scored up this lesson for myself. Certain things were never to be spoken of, certain things never to be looked at in certain ways, certain things never to be done consciously, or for the pleasure to be got out of them. One stepped out of childish conventions into mannish conventions, and did so, certainly, without any instruction from outside. I remember, for instance, that, as children, it was a rigid part of our belief that our father was the handsomest man in the world--handsome was the word. In the same way our mother was by prerogative the most beautiful woman. If some hero flashed upon our scene--Garibaldi, Lancelot of the Lake, or another--the greatest praise we could possibly have given him for beauty, excellence, courage, or manly worth would have put him second to our father. So also Helen of Sparta and Beatrice of Florence gave way. That was the law of the nursery, rigid and never to be questioned until unconsciously I grew out of it, and becoming a man, put upon me the panoply of manly eyes. I now accepted it that to kiss my sister was nothing, but that to kiss her friend would be very wicked. I discovered that there were two ways of looking at a young woman, and two ways of thinking about her. I discovered that it was lawful to have some kinds of appetite, and to take pleasure in food, exercise, sleep, warmth, cold water, hot water, the smell of flowers, and quite unlawful so much as to think of, or to admit to myself the existence of other kinds of appetite. I discovered, in fact, that love was a shameful thing, that if one was in love one concealed it from the world, and, above all the world, from the object of one's love. The conviction was probably instinctive, for one is not