Harry was fortunate in having the Vicar to help and encourage him in his Natural History studies, for this was a subject in which Wilbraham took no interest. Mr. Thomson was an old bachelor, who had been Vicar of Royd for over forty years. His house was a museum, and Harry revelled in it. No doubt he would have developed his tastes in that direction without any guidance, but Mr. Thomson put him on the right lines, and was overjoyed, at the end of his life, to have so apt a pupil. He took him out birds’ nesting, geologizing, botanizing, and encouraged him to form his own collections though the boy showed no great keenness in this form of acquisition. He wanted to know about everything around him but to collect specimens did not greatly interest him. However, he was proud enough when the old man died and bequeathed to him all his treasures. At this time he was arranging them in a couple of rooms that had been given up to them in the Castle. But the excitement was already beginning to wear a little thin. When he was not working with Wilbraham he always wanted to be out of doors, even in bad weather. And he missed his old friend; it made him rather sad to be poring over the cases and shelves and cabinets that had been so much a part of him. Part of the old Vicar’s preoccupation had been with the antiquities of the country in which he had lived. He had collected legends and folk-lore, perhaps in rather a dry-as-dust way; but it was all material for the boy’s glowing imagination to work upon. All the books were there, now in Harry’s possession, and many manuscript notes, too. And scattered over the country were the remnants of old beliefs and old rites, which took one right back to the dim ages of the past. There was a cromlech within the park walls of Royd itself, and from it could be seen a shining stretch of sea under which lay, according to ancient tradition, a deep-forested land that had once been alive with romance. All this was very real to Harry, too. The figures of Celtic heroes mixed themselves up with those of the classical gods and heroes. The fairies and pixies of his own romantic land were still more real to him than the fauns and dryads of ancient Greece; as he grew older his expectation of meeting with a stray woodland nymph during his forest rambles died away, but he was more firmly convinced than ever that the native fairies were all about him, if he could only see them. He lay for a very long time under the beech, quite motionless, but with his senses acutely alert. He heard every tiny sound made by the creatures of the night, and of nature which sleeps but lightly under the moon, and took in all their meaning, but without thinking about them. The shadow cast by the tree under which he was lying had shifted an appreciable space over the brightly illumined grass since he had stirred a muscle. And all the time his expectation grew.