“Then old Sneard looked up at me, with imploring eyes. ‘I’ve been a beast,’ he moaned, ‘and you were always a good boy. Call them off for the sake of my little girl.’ But I only laughed sepulchrally,” said the Bantam. “Your little girl will be jolly well glad when you’re dead,” said I. “Everybody will be glad,” said the Bantam. “And then a third tiger crept out of the bushes and bit off his head, putting an end to his agony.” “You needn’t have killed him so soon,” I would expostulate discontentedly. “I’d got something else I wanted to do to him.” “All right,” the Bantam would assent cheerfully; “let’s kill him again.” So real was this land of IT to us, that we would shout with excitement as we reached the climax of our narrations. The English fields through which we wandered became swamps, deserts, and forests at will. It became part of our game to pretend that we might meet Lilith any day. Often we would break bounds, stealing down country lanes and peering through hedges, hoping that at the next turn we should discover her seated before her camp-fire. Hope deferred never curbed our eagerness; we always believed that we should meet her next time. If we did not meet Lilith, we met someone equally strange--Lady Zion, the Creature’s sister. It was the Bantam who told me all about her. “She’s wrong up there,” he said, tapping his forehead. “She thinks she’s something out of the Bible; that’s why she calls herself Lady Zion Holy Ghost. She goes about the country dressed in white, riding on a donkey, muttering to herself, looking for someone she can never find. She thinks that she’s in love with old Sneard, and that he don’t care for her. They say that once he was going to marry her and then threw her over. That’s what sent her balmy.” When I grew older I learnt the truth about the Creature and his sister. He became a firm friend of mine before schooldays were ended. He was a man who possessed a faculty for not getting on in the world which, had it been of value, would have amounted to genius. Anyone else with his brains and instinct for daring guess-work in scientific experiment, would have made a reputation. Instead of which he pottered his life out at the Red House, defending his sister and allowing himself to be imposed on both by boys and masters. Popularity was the armor which permitted you to do almost anything with impunity. A boy would take almost any chance to get it. Very early in my school experience the Bantam thought out a plan which he invited me to share--with the dire result that I was brought into intimate contact with Mr. Sneard.