Again Challis came to my rescue. He brought me a great sheaf of notes. "Look here," he said, "if you can't write a true history of that strange child, I see no reason why you should not write his story as it is known to you, as it impinges on your own life. After all, you, in many ways, know more of him than any one. You came nearest to receiving his confidence." "But only during the last few months," I said. "Does that matter?" said Challis with an upheaval of his shoulders--"shrug" is far too insignificant a word for that mountainous humping. "Is any biography founded on better material than you have at command?" He unfolded his bundle of notes. "See here," he said, "here is some magnificent material for you--first-hand observations made at the time. Can't you construct a story from that?" Even then I began to cast my story in a slightly biographical form. I wrote half a dozen chapters, and read them to Challis. "Magnificent, my dear fellow," was his comment, "magnificent; but no one will believe it." I had been carried away by my own prose, and with the natural vanity of the author, I resented intensely his criticism. For some weeks I did not see Challis again, and I persisted in my futile endeavour, but always as I wrote that killing suggestion insinuated itself: "No one will believe you." At times I felt as a man may feel who has spent many years in a lunatic asylum; and after his release is for ever engaged in a struggle to allay the doubts of a leering suspicion. I gave up the hopeless task at last, and sought out Challis again. "Write it as a story," he suggested, "and give up the attempt to carry conviction." And in that spirit, adopting the form of a story, I did begin, and in that form I hope to finish. But here as I reach the great division, the determining factor of Victor Stott's life, I am constrained to pause and apologise. I have become uncomfortably conscious of my own limitations, and the feeble, ephemeral methods I am using. I am trifling with a wonderful story, embroidering my facts with the tawdry detail of my own imagining. I saw--I see--no other way. This is, indeed, a preface, yet I prefer to put it in this place, since it was at this time I wrote it. * * * * * On the Common a faint green is coming again like a mist among the ash-trees, while the oak is still dead and bare. Last year the oak came first. They say we shall have a wet summer. PART TWO (_Continued_) THE WONDER AMONG BOOKS PART TWO (_Continued_) THE WONDER AMONG BOOKS CHAPTER IX HIS PASSAGE THROUGH THE PRISON OF KNOWLEDGE I Challis led the way to the library; Lewes, petulant and mutinous, hung in the rear.