(_BY_ GEORGE VERIMYTH, _AUTHOR OF "RICHARD'S SEVERAL EDITIONS," "THE
APHORIST," "SHAMPOO'S SHAVING-POT."_)

[With this story came a long, explanatory letter. The story,
however, is itself so clear and easy to understand (as is all
the work of this master), that the accompanying commentary is
unnecessary.]

CHAPTER I.

In the earlier portion of the lives of all of us there is a time,
heaven-given without doubt, for all things, as we know, draw their
origin thence, if only in our blundering, ill-conditioned way we trace
them back far enough with the finger of fate pointing to us as in
mockery of all striving of ours on this rough bosom of our mother
earth, a time there comes when the senses rebel, first faintly, and
then with ever-increasing vehemence, panting, beating, buffeting and
breasting the torrent of necessity, against the parental decree that
would drench our inmost being in the remedial powder of a Gregorian
doctor, famous, I doubt not, in his day, and much bepraised by them
that walked delicately in the light of pure reason and the healthful
flow of an untainted soul, but now cast out and abhorred of childhood
soaring on uplifted wing through the vast blue of the modern
pharmacopoeia. Yet to them is there not comfort too in the symbolic
outpourings of a primæval wisdom which, embodied for all time in
imperishable verse, are chanted in the haunts of the very young like
the soft lappings of the incoming tide on a beach where rounded pebble
disputes with shining sand the mastery of the foreshore?