The train ran on and on, and still I throned it in my corner, awake or dreaming, indisputably master of all the things that counted. The three aunts faded into antimacassars; the little girl endured her uninteresting life and became an aunt and an antimacassar in her turn, and still I swung my legs in my corner seat, a boy-errant in the strange places of the world. I do not remember the name of the station at which the bearded guard ultimately brought me out of my dreams. I do remember standing stiffly on the platform and deciding that I had been travelling night and day for three hundred years. When I communicated this fact to the relatives who met me they were strangely unimpressed; but I knew that when I returned home to my brothers they would display a decent interest in the story of my wanderings. After all, you can’t expect grown-up people to understand everything! THE MAGIC POOL BEING born in a sceptical age, heirs of a world that certainly took its Darwin too seriously, we children did not readily enlarge the circle of our supernatural acquaintances. There was the old witch who lived in the two-storied house beyond the hill, in whom less discriminate eyes recognised only the very respectable widow of an officer in the India Army. There was the ghost of the murdered shepherd-lad that haunted the ruined hut high up on the windy downs; on gusty nights we heard him piping shrilly to his phantom flocks, and sometimes their little bells seemed to greet us from the chorus of the storm. There was a little drowned kitten who mewed to us from the shadows of the rain-water cistern, and a small boy who cried about the garden in the autumn because he could not find his ball among the dead leaves. We had all heard the three last, and most of us had seen them at twilight-time, when ghosts pluck up their poor thin courage and take their walks abroad. As for the witch, we relied on our intuitions and gave her house a wide berth. The credentials of these four unquiet spirits having been examined and found satisfactory, schoolroom opinion was against any addition to their number. We would not accept my younger brother’s murderer carrying a sack or my little sister’s procession of special tortoises, though we acknowledged that there was merit in them, regarded merely as artistic conceptions. Perhaps, subconsciously, we realised that to make the supernatural commonplace is also to make it ineffective, and that there is no dignity in a life jostled by spooks. At all events, we relied for our periodical panics on those which had received the official sanction, and on the terrifying monsters our imaginations had drawn from real life—burglars, lunatics, and drunken men.