I was a precocious boy. I knew nothing of boys' games and sports, and all at once I had come out of the cold, arid life at Bracken Glen into the rich and varied lights and colours of poetry. The change was overwhelming and intoxicating. My reading had, in a vague way, been progressive. I had begun with fairy tales. To these had succeeded stories of adventure and travel, and to them poetry and plays. Prose romances and novels came last, for I had fought shy of them at first, considering that they dealt too much with people and scenes like those in my own experience of life. When first I broke free among books I wished to forget the world. Towards the end of April two things drove me to the novels. The supply of other books had been exhausted, and I began to yearn after a glimpse at what possibilities of poetry and wonder still existed in the world, as the world was going on outside the sphere of my experience. I wanted to see in books the things now visible to other eyes still on earth--things hidden from me by barriers of age and circumstances I could not understand. From this desire arose the romance of my life. One evening George Harding mentioned at tea that Mr. Seymour, a gentleman who owned an estate in the neighbourhood and had a fine house, Trafford Manor, a couple of miles further out from Bickerton, was going to give a ball the end of that month. The Hardings did not look on balls as exactly wicked, and said nothing for or against the approaching party. They did not, of course, know the Trafford Manor folk, who were county people, and quite inaccessible to traders in Bickerton.