In some ways he was grateful to Mr. Leeming for superintending his literary diet, but he soon detected a sameness in the fare. One day he had got hold of a big Maroon edition of George Gordon, Lord Byron, with romantic engravings of the Newstead ruins and the poet’s own handsome head, and Mr. Leeming had swooped down on him, faintly flushed. “Lord Byron,” he had said, “was not a good man. Have you read _Hiawatha_?” And he reached down Longfellow . . . Longfellow in green boards decorated with a geometrical design in gold, and irritating to the touch. At last Edwin was almost driven from the library by Mr. Leeming’s attentions. He never read Byron because the books were too big to be sneaked out of the room beneath a buttoned coat; but he did read, without distinction, nearly every volume of poetry that he could smuggle out in this way. He read these books in second “prep” when Layton was poring over Plato at his high desk, when Widdup was working out the cricket averages of the second eleven, and Griffin was looking for spicy bits in the Bible. And as second prep was generally a period of great sleepiness—since the boys had risen so early, and by that time of evening the air of the house classroom had been breathed and rebreathed so many times as to be almost narcotic, the poetry that he read became interwoven with the strands of his dreams. Dreamy and exalted, poppy-drenched, all poetry seemed at this time; and it was to intensify this feeling of sensuous languor that he so often chose the poems of Keats. In an introduction to the volume he had discovered that Keats had been an apothecary, and this filled him with a strange glow; for since the unforgettable incident of the toothbrush he had been (against his will) diffident about his father. He determined never again to be ashamed of the shop. When he read of “rich lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon,” he remembered a great cut-glass bottle of some cough linctus that glowed like a ruby in the shop window when the gas was lit at night. In other ways he tapped a good deal of the romance of his father’s calling. He remembered a drawer labelled “Dragon’s blood” . . . the very next best thing to a dragon’s teeth with their steely harvest. He recalled a whole pomander-full of provocative scents; he shuddered at the remembered names of poisons, and other names that suggested alchemy. He almost wanted to tell Mr. Leeming when next they spoke together, of his father’s trade, but he wasn’t quite sure if Mr. Leeming approved of Keats. It was not likely that he would see very much more of this master, for he was high up in his form and certain to get a move into the Lower Fifth at the end of the term. In some ways he was not sorry; for the signs of Mr. Leeming’s affection, the warm encircling arm, the pervading scent of honeydew, and the naïve glances of those watery eyes were embarrassing. Before they parted Mr. Leeming showed his intentions more clearly.