at the beginning of the important part of life....

And now, as he lay in bed and heard the owls hooting in the woods, and
smelt the flowers through the open window, his thoughts followed
strongly after that old Star Train that he used to drive about the
sky. He was both engine-driver and passenger. He fell asleep to dream
of it.

And all the vital and enchanting thoughts of his boyhood flowed back
upon him with a rush, as though they had never been laid aside. He
remembered particularly one singular thing about them--that they had
never seemed quite his own, but that he had either read or heard them
somewhere else. As a child the feeling was always strong that these
'jolly thoughts,' as he called them, were put into him by some one
else--some one who whispered to him--some one who lived close behind
his ears. He had to listen very hard to catch them. It was _not_
dreams, yet all night long, especially when he slept tightly, as he
phrased it, this fairy whispering continued, and in the daytime he
remembered what he could and made up his stories accordingly. He stole
these ideas about a Star Net and a Starlight Express. One day he would
be caught and punished for it. It was trespassing upon the preserves
of some one else.

Yet he could never discover who this some one else was, except that it
was a 'she' and lived among the stars, only coming out at night. He
imagined she hid behind that little dusty constellation called the
Pleiades, and that was why the Pleiades wore a veil and were so dim--
lest he should find her out. And once, behind the blue gaze of the
guard-girl, who was out of his heart by this time, he had known a
moment of thrilling wonder that was close to awe. He saw another pair