outstanding ears, combined to give him something the look of a piskie's
changeling. Already the first innocence of childhood was wearing away,
and the deliberate cleanliness of mind achieved, if at all, in the
malleable years between fifteen and twenty was as yet far ahead.
Nevertheless, Parson Boase was not wrong in scenting the idealist in
Ishmael, and he wondered how far the determined but excitable child,
with the nervous strain of his race and all the little bluntnesses of a
boy ungently reared, might prove the prey of circumstance; or whether,
after all, he might not so build up resisting power as to make a fair
thing of his life. A no more distant future than the next hour held
Ishmael's mind at the moment, and attracted by a strong smell of
peppermint from the marsh, the child turned that way, to add the pale
purple blossoms to his fast-wilting bunch.

A man in a black cassock, looped up for convenience in walking by a
shabby cincture, was wandering among the brambles and gorse bushes,
peering short-sightedly here and there, and as Ishmael appeared the
man's hand closed suddenly over some object on a leaf. Ishmael had
hardly recognised the Parson before he himself was seen.

"Come and look at what I've got here," shouted Boase, straightening his
long back and holding his curved-out hands aloft. Ishmael ran towards
him, the tussocks, dry from long drought, swaying and sagging beneath
him. As he drew near he caught a whirring sound, so strong as to seem
metallic, and saw a big green and yellow dragon-fly fighting in the
Parson's hands. Boase took hold of it carefully but firmly by the wings,
and the creature stared angrily at Ishmael with its huge glassy green
eyes, opening its oddly-fleshy mouth and wagging its fawn-coloured lips
like an evil infant cockatrice.