of always winning. It's hard to say how early I began to believe I could
see things that were going to happen. By the hour I used to shake the
dice on the billiard-table at Castlegarry, trying to see with my eyes
shut the numbers about to come up. Of course now and then I saw the
right numbers; and it deepened the conviction that if I cultivated the
gift I'd be able to be right nearly every time. When I went to a horse-
race I used to fasten my mind on the signal, and tried to see beforehand
the number of the winner. Again sometimes I was very right indeed, and
that deepened my confidence in myself. I was always at it. I'd try and
guess--try and see--the number of the hymn which was on the paper in the
vicar's hand before he gave it out, and I would bet with myself on it.
I would bet with myself or with anybody available on any conceivable
thing--the minutes late a train would be; the pints of milk a cow would
give; the people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the babies that would
be christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a peck of raw potatoes.
I was out against the universe. But it wasn't serious at all--just a
boy's mania--till one day my father met me in London when I came down
from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street. There
was the thing that finished me. I was twenty-one, and restless-minded,
and with eyes wide open.

"Well, he took me to Thwaite's where I was to become a member, and
after a little while he left me to go and have a long pow-wow with the
committee--he was a member of it. He told me to make myself at home,
and I did so as soon as his back was turned. Almost the first thing with
which I became sociable was a book which, at my first sight of it, had a
fascination for me. The binding was very old, and the leather was worn,
as you will see the leather of a pocketbook, till it looks and feels like
a nice soap. That book brought me here."