licate boy, and after he had settled down, from his father's house at Chovensbury, to learn the Fortune, East and Sabre business that he began

n,-as a young and vigorous animal for its meals. But at twenty-eight and thirty, reading for the first time, he read sometimes with a sense of revelation, always with an enormous

f literary men, the English essayists in a nice set, Shakespeare in many forms and so much poetry that at a glance his library was all poetry. All the books were picked up at second-hand dealers' in Tidborough, none had cost more than a few shillings. The common quality that bound them was that they stirred in him imaginative th