Mahaly never told where she had been, nor with whom. I thought of the King of Yearth, in his Aladdin cave; I thought also of the sacrifices and libations she had prepared for the altar, and of priests who might well have appreciated them. But nobody ever knew. Once, pressed too closely, she had made some cryptic allusion to “a merracle”; and a miracle indeed it seemed to those who had known her half their lives as a man-hating spinster of uncertain age. But people pay heavily for miracles. Mahaly never recovered from hers. She had the child christened “Infant Samuel” after an admired picture in Aunt Lady’s parlour; and then she died, vaguer and more queer than ever, babbling of mystic things. She left the Infant Samuel, of course, to Aunt Lady, who seemed to find the legacy quite natural. It was not her first. “And, besides, I can’t help feeling that Tom was sort of responsible,” she admitted, ignoring her husband’s startled disclaimer. Sam’l’s infancy was no problem; he just grew up, she said, “like any of the puppies,” in and out of the kitchen, the barn, the wash house--who minded an extra piccaninny or two around? But the school age brought difficulties. Not that Sam’l was mischievous, or disobedient, or lazy, like ordinary coloured children. His name seemed to have affected his nature, thus proving a theory of George Moore’s: the Infant Samuel was, like his pictured prototype, a model child. But the other coloured children failed to appreciate him. “Dey mocks at me all de time,” he said quite patiently, not at all complaining. No matter how serious Sam’l was, the teacher reported, he seemed to move his schoolmates to ribald mirth. And for this there may have been some cause. He not only looked peculiar, with his long, pointed head, his anxious solemnity, and his extreme limberness of body, but he did peculiar things. For example, the sums on his slate looked like real sums, quite neatly done, until one examined them more closely, when they were found to be composed of mere pothooks, meaningless hieroglyphics which resembled figures, and which he seemed to think did quite as well. “Ha, the imagist theory!” murmured my husband, who interests himself in movements. And once during geography class, when there were visitors, the teacher had invited Sam’l, who drew quite nicely, to do a map of the United States upon the blackboard from memory. The result was a vaguely familiar outline which resembled a map, in that states and lakes and rivers were all neatly marked, the mountains very handsomely shaded indeed. But one of the visitors, examining it in a puzzled manner, had discovered that its outline was the profile, face downward, of George Washington. Sam’l was sent home in disgrace for poking fun at company. But he protested earnestly that he “hadn’t never poked fun at nobody,” not he. That was the way he saw his native land, and he had drawn it so. “Ho! The subjective school,” muttered my husband.