tardy explanations of the grown-ups had, if anything, increased his glamour. It seemed to us that he must be very wise. He lived in an old house a little way out of the town, and the house stood in a garden after our own heart. We knew by the shocked comments of our elders that it had formerly been cut and trimmed like all the other gardens with which we were acquainted, but it was now a perfect wilderness, a delightful place. My brother and I got up early one morning when the dew was on the world and explored it thoroughly. `We found a goat in an outhouse and could see the marks in the meadow that had once been a lawn, where he was tethered during the day. The wool-gatherer was evidently in the habit of sitting under a tree that stood at one corner, for the earth was pitted with the holes that had been made by the legs of his chair. Being a wise man, we thought it probable that he conversed with his goat and could understand the answers of that pensive animal, who wagged his beard at us when we peeped shyly into his den. In the long grass by the tree we found a book bound like a school prize lying quite wet with the dew. It was full of cabalistic signs, and we took care to leave it where we found it lest it should be black magic, though now I would support the theory that Mr. X. read his Homer in the original. Taking it altogether, it was the most sensible garden we had ever seen, with plenty of old fruit-trees, but with none of those silly flower-beds that incommode the careless feet of youth. Our expedition enhanced our opinion of the wool-gatherer’s wisdom. Here at least was a grown-up person who knew how to live in a decent fashion, and when he ambled by us in the market-place, his muddy boots tripping on the cobbles, and the pockets of his green-grey overcoat pulled down by the weight of his hands, our eyes paid him respectful tribute. He really served a useful purpose in our universe, for he showed us that it was possible to grow old without going hopelessly to the bad. Sometimes, considering the sad lives of our elders who did of their own free will all the disagreeable things that we were made to do by force, we had been smitten with the fear that in the course of years we, too, would be afflicted with this melancholy disease. The wool-gatherer restored our confidence in ourselves. If he could be grown-up without troubling to be tidy or energetic, why, then, so could we! It amused us to feel that our affronted rulers were itching to give him a good talking to and to send him off to brush his clothes and his boots; but he was beyond the reach of authority, this splendid man. And one of these days we thought that we, too, would enjoy this delightful condition of freedom, for, like many grown men and women, we did not realise that liberty is a state of mind and not an environment.