From that night his horizons began to expand, and he wondered at himself for the blindness in which he had hitherto spent his life. The London streets, in spite of the wind and the sun and the rain and the fog, woke into a teeming life of their own, and pelted suggestions at him as the crowd pelted confetti at mi-carême. He began not to dislike the crowded pavements, for he no longer took any notice of the real people who were there, so absorbing had become the shop windows which gave him the material which he translated into dreams. Hitherto, when he had passed a fish shop he had held his breath, so that the objectionable smell of it might not vex him; now, he inhaled it with a gusto as adding to the vividness of M. Pierre Loti’s “Pêcheur d’Islande,” He would stand before a fish shop for five minutes at a time, and be no longer in Bond Street, but in the hold of his boat or on the quay at Paimpol. Even the boy in the shop who went out with a flat tray on his shoulder was _mon frère Yves_, and Oliver almost spoke to him in French. Next door was a shop filled with Japanese screens and carved jade and branches of paper cherry-blossom, and lo! his fishing experiences were whisked away, and he was living in the land of _Madame Chrysanthème_. But it was only for a short while that the shop windows were, so to speak, coloured illustrations in books written by other men, for he soon discarded these second-hand canvases, and constructed out of them and the wealth of suggestive material that lay broadcast round him new and amazing adventures of his own. His senses, and in particular his sense of smell, grew every day more acute, for daily he was keenly on the look out for a sight or sound, a touch or smell, that would be to him a hint out of which he could evolve some fantastic imagination that lived henceforth in his brain as the memory of an actual experience lives in the brain of those who, like his sister, must know that a thing has happened to them before they can call it their own.