This troubled the serenity of his childhood, though Val himself did not know the reason why. His recollections of the earlier period of his life had grown very vague in these years. Val had been well disposed to be communicative on the subject when he came to Eskside first. He had shown on many occasions a dangerous amount of interest and knowledge as to the economy of the travelling vans which sometimes passed through Lasswade with shows of various kinds, or basketmakers or tinkers; and once had followed one of them for miles along the road, and had been brought back again much disfigured with weeping, whimpering that his mammy must be there. But children are very quick to perceive when their recollections are not acceptable to the people about them, and still more easily led into other channels of thought; and as he had nothing near him to recall that chapter of his life to his mind, he gradually forgot it. There was still a vague light of familiarity and interest in his eyes if, by any chance, he came upon an encampment of gipsies, or the vans of a show, or even the travelling tramps upon the road; but the boy, I think, came to be ashamed of this feeling of interest, and to divine that his early life was no credit to him, but rather something to be concealed, about the same time as he ceased to be the perfect little actor and social performer he had been in his first stage. He began to be conscious of himself, that most confusing and bewildering of experiences. This consciousness comes later or earlier, according to the constitution of the individual; but when it comes it has always a confusing influence upon the young mind and life. When one’s self thrusts into sight, and insists upon filling up the foreground of the scene, it changes all natural rules of proportion and perspective. The child or the youth has to review everything around him over again to get it into keeping with this new phantom suddenly arisen, which does nothing but harass his mind, and puts him out in all his calculations. Me--how much has been said about it, philosophies based upon it, the whole heaven and earth founded on this atom! but there is nothing that bewilders the young soul so much as to see it surging up through the fair, sunny, matter-of-fact universe, and through the world of dreams, disturbing and disarranging everything. This change befell Valentine early. I think it began from that day in the woods, which was full of so many experiences. Even then he had been faintly conscious of himself--conscious of “showing off” to dazzle Violet on the linn--conscious of deceiving her as to their safety when she began to cry with fatigue and loneliness, and he, upon whom all the responsibility of the escapade lay, had to think how she was to be got home. In the chaotic bit of existence which followed, when Oxford, worsted, left the field, and Edinburgh, dauntless, came in, Valentine had a tough fight with this Frankenstein of himself, this creature which