comparison were he twenty-five?

Yes, his little room was to be dismantled on the morrow,--this first
little private chapel of his spirit. This fair order of shelves, this
external harmony answering to an inner harmony of his spirit, were to be
broken up for ever. Often as he had sat in the folioed lamplit nook
which was, as it were, the very chancel of the little church, and gazed
in an ecstasy at the books, each with a great shining name of fame upon
its cover, it had seemed as though he had put his very soul outside him,
externalised it in this little corner of books and pictures. His soul
shivered, as one who must go houseless awhile, at the thought that
to-morrow its home would be no more. When and how would be its
reincarnation? More magnificent, maybe, but never this again. It was
sacrilege,--was it not ingratitude too? When once more the books and the
pictures began to form into a new harmony, there would be no mother's
love to help the work go on....

But as he mused in this no doubt sentimental fashion, the door opened
and the little red-headed Mike entered. His was a little Flibbertigibbet
of a face, already lined with the practice of mimicry; and there was in
it a very attractive blending of tenderness and humour. Mike was also
one of those whom life at the beginning had impressed with the delight
of one kind of work and no other. When a mere imp of a boy, the
heartless tormentor of a large and sententious stepmother, the despair
of schoolmasters, the most ingenious of truants, a humorous ragamuffin
invulnerable to punishment, it was already revealed to him that his
mission in life was to be the observation and reproduction of human
character, particularly in its humorous aspects. To this end Nature had
gifted him with a face that was capable of every form of transformation,
and at an early age he hastened to put it in training. All day long he