"Oscar would frequently vary the entertainment by giving us extremely quaint
illustrations of holy people in stained-glass attitudes: his power of twisting
his limbs into weird contortions being very great. (I am told that Sir William
Wilde, his father, possessed the same power.) It must not be thought, however,
that there was any suggestion of irreverence in the exhibition.

"At one of these gatherings, about the year 1870, I remember a discussion
taking place about an ecclesiastical prosecution that made a considerable stir
at the time. Oscar was present, and full of the mysterious nature of the Court
of Arches; he told us there was nothing he would like better in after life than
to be the hero of such a "cause celebre" and to go down to posterity as the
defendant in such a case as 'Regina versus Wilde!'

"At school he was almost always called 'Oscar'--but he had a nick-name,
'Grey-crow,' which the boys would call him when they wished to annoy him, and
which he resented greatly. It was derived in some mysterious way from the name
of an island in the Upper Loch Erne, within easy reach of the school by boat.

"It was some little time before he left Portora that the boys got to know of his
full name, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. Just at the close of his
school career he won the 'Carpenter' Greek Testament Prize,--and on presentation
day was called up to the dais by Dr. Steele, by all his names--much to Oscar's
annoyance; for a great deal of schoolboy chaff followed.

"He was always generous, kindly, good-tempered. I remember he and myself were
on one occasion mounted as opposing jockeys on the backs of two bigger boys in
what we called a 'tournament,' held in one of the class-rooms. Oscar and his
horse were thrown, and the result was a broken arm for Wilde. Knowing that it
was an accident, he did not let it make any difference in our friendship.