Who taught me to call him by the name of Harold I do not know, but in my youthful days the man’s character was oddly associated with the idea of virtue as expounded in the books I read on Sunday afternoons. That I hated him was, I felt, merely a fitting attribute in one whose instincts were admittedly bad, but I did not allow the consideration to affect my rejoicings when I escaped from his company. Curiously, too, I perceived that the Olympians were with me in this, and since the moral soundness of those improving books was beyond question, I had grave doubts as to their ultimate welfare. But it was always an easy task to detect the Olympians tripping in their own moralities; they had so many. As time went on, and I grew out of the Sunday books and all that they stood for, I came to believe that I was growing out of Harold too. His appearances became rare, and, from his point of view, a little ineffective. It pleased me to consider with a schoolboy’s arrogance that he was little more than a child’s nightmare, and that if a man turned to fight him Harold would vanish. For a while Harold, in his cunning, played up to this idea. He would seek my side timidly, and fly at a word. The long, sleepless nights of childhood and the weary days were forgotten, and I made of him a jest. Sometimes I wondered whether he really existed. And then he came. At first I was only mildly astonished when I found that nothing I could say would make him leave me, but as the hours passed the old hatred asserted itself, and to fight the little man with the dull voice and the cruel spots on his clothes seemed all that there was in life to do. The hours passed into days and nights, and sometimes I was passive in the hope that he might weary, sometimes I shouted answers to his questions—the same answer to the same question—over and over again. I felt, too, that if I could only see his features plainly for a moment he would disappear, and I would stare at him until the sky grew red as my eyes. But I could not see him clearly, and the world became a thing of dull colours, terrible with spots. By now I was fighting him with a sense of my own fatuity, for I felt that nothing would make this man fight fairly. His voice had fallen to a passionless whisper and the spots on his clothes swelled into obscene blotches and burst like over-ripe fruit. It was then that the chloroform clutched me by the throat. I have never known anything on earth more sweet.