in his expression, he was nothing out of the common. He was in the
shirt-sleeves and tucked-up apron of his trade, and a pencil was
thrust behind his inoffensive ear. Athwart his black waistcoat was
a gold chain, from which dangled a bent guinea.

"Nothing more to-day, sir?" he inquired. He leant forward over
my bill as he spoke.

"Are you Mr. Skelmersdale?" said I.

"I am, sir," he said, without looking up.

"Is it true that you have been in Fairyland?"

He looked up at me for a moment with wrinkled brows, with an aggrieved,
exasperated face. "O SHUT it! " he said, and, after a moment
of hostility, eye to eye, he went on adding up my bill. "Four,
six and a half," he said, after a pause. "Thank you, Sir."

So, unpropitiously, my acquaintance with Mr. Skelmersdale began.

Well, I got from that to confidence--through a series of toilsome
efforts. I picked him up again in the Village Room, where of a night
I went to play billiards after my supper, and mitigate the extreme
seclusion from my kind that was so helpful to work during the day.
I contrived to play with him and afterwards to talk with him. I found
the one subject to avoid was Fairyland. On everything else he was
open and amiable in a commonplace sort of way, but on that he had
been worried--it was a manifest taboo. Only once in the room did
I hear the slightest allusion to his experience in his presence,