Then I knew why it was that the sight of his little figure had drawn me out of my path to sit beside him, and why the little serious face had seemed so familiar to me, as of some one I had once known long ago. So we talked of books and bookmen. He told me how, having been born on the fourteenth of February, his name had come to be Valentine, though privileged parties, as for example Aunt Emma, and Mr. Dawson, and Cousin Naomi, had shortened it to Val, and Mama would sometimes call him Pickaniny, but that was only when they were quite alone. In return I confided to him my name, and discovered that he had never heard it, which pained me for the moment, until I found that of all my confrères, excepting only Mr. Stevenson, he was equally ignorant, he having lived with the heroes and the heroines of the past, the new man and the new woman, the new pathos and the new humour being alike unknown to him. Scott and Dumas and Victor Hugo were his favourites. 'Gulliver's Travels,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Don Quixote,' and the 'Arabian Nights,' he knew almost by heart, and these we discussed, exchanging many pleasant and profitable ideas upon the same. But the psychological novel, I gathered, was not to his taste. He liked '_real_ stories,' he told me, naïvely unconscious of the satire, 'where people did things.' 'I used to read silly stuff once,' he confessed humbly, 'Indian tales and that sort of thing, you know, but Mama said I'd never be able to write if I read that rubbish.' 'So you gave it up,' I concluded for him. 'Yes,' he answered. But a little sigh of regret, I thought, escaped him at the same time. 'And what do you read now?' I asked. 'I'm reading Marlowe's plays and De Quincey's Confessions (he called him Quinsy) just now,' was his reply. 'And do you understand them?' I queried. 'Fairly well,' he answered. Then added more hopefully, 'Mama says I'll get to like them better as I go on.' 'I want to learn to write very, very well indeed,' he suddenly added after a long pause, his little earnest face growing still more serious, 'then I'll be able to earn heaps of money.'