The same human race included that devil Shawn, the bronze butchers who fell upon Deerfield, a smiling murderer with one eye. Of course. Sometimes also Reuben speculated: If they--Heath, or Hibbs, or Tench, or even dear Kate--if ever they knew that I am a monster, a _lusus naturae_, a two-headed calf, a moral leper so outlandish and beyond hope of forgiveness that, were my nature known, even the children in the street would be a bit afraid to throw dead cats and dung--what then? Would there then be any part of this earth where Amadeus and I might go, and not be hated, driven, feared, utterly condemned?... The thought came only in the darkest hours; seldom if ever when he was with Mr. Welland, the world excluded, the ugly pockmarked face an unfathomable essay in the beautiful, the moment blazing or peaceful as sun on summer grass. Here in the mist, the fear touched him as an almost trivial thing, an arrow missing the mark, a fire burning somewhere else, a lesson glimpsed further on in the book. _Blessed be the mask--and yet I hate it, will ever hate it, wearing it only because I wish to live, remembering it was not worn in the time that some have named the Golden Age._ If I am a monster--who seem to myself a young man not incapable of the earthly virtues, who love the sun and rain as well as any man and would never willingly do a dishonest thing or hurt anyone, who need and rejoice like any man in all the harmless glory of the senses--then who made me a monster? If I am evil, who set the standard whereby men and women are to be judged? Let Mr. Cotton Mather tell me God did so and will punish the transgressor: I am not interested, nor is Amadeus, who doth believe in God after his own fashion. Reuben knew he was near the beech tree. He put out his hand to find the amiable tower of it and leaned against it in the mist, remembering. I stood here last year, having made certain discoveries. A good day--April, I think. Ben rode home smiling. A long time ago. It was never possible to hold away for any long stretch of minutes the knowledge that Ben was gone. One schooled the mind to repeat that lesson, though it might whimper and snarl miserably in repeating it: _He is probably lost._ Then, the lesson driven home once more, he turned usually to Vesalius, or _Micrographia_, or _Neurologia Universalis_ (Ben's gift!), or the collected works of Ambroise Paré, or the _Severall Surgical Treatises_ of Richard Wiseman, because Mr. Welland said it was time for him to acquire a small preliminary hint of the enigmas of knife and suture. "But _why_ do so many die after trifling minor surgery? Don't we all suffer small cuts and bruises repeatedly and take no harm by it?"