Well, at last I began to read in Mr. Nahum's bookI won't say page by page, but as the fancy took me. It consisted chiefly of rhymes and poems, and some of them had pictured capitals and were decorated in clear bright colours like the pages of the old books illuminated by monks centuries ago. Apart from the poems were here and there pieces of prose. These, I found, always had some bearing on the poems, and, like them, many of them were queerly spelt. Occasionally Mr. Nahum had jotted down his own thoughts in the margin. But the pictures were my first concern.

Sometimes I went off to them from the book in order to find the particular one I wanted. And sometimes the other way round: I would have a good long stare at a picture, then single out the proper rhyme in the book. Often, either in one way or the other, I failed. For there were far fewer pictures than there were pages in the book, and for scores of pages I found no picture at all. It seemed Mr. Nahum had made paintings only of those he liked best.

The book itself, I found, was the first of three, the other two being similar to itself but much thicker and heavier. Into these I dipped occasionally, but found that the rhymes in them interested me less or were less easily understandable. Even some of those in the first book were a little beyond my wits at the time. But experience seems to be like the shining of a bright lantern. It suddenly makes clear in the mind what was already there perhaps, but dim. And often though I immediately liked what I read, long years were to go by before I really understood it, made it my own. There would come a moment, something would happen; and I would say to myself:-"Oh, that, then, is what that meant !"

Before going any further I must confess that I was exceedingly slow over Mr. Nahum's writings. Even

over Volume I. When first I opened its pages I had had a poor liking for poetry because of a sort of contempt for it. "Poetry!" I would scoff to myself, and would shut up the covers of any such book with a kind of yawn inside me. Some of it had come my way in lesson books. This I could gabble off like a parrot, and with as much understanding; and I had just begun to grind out a little Latin verse for my father.

But I had never troubled to think about it; to share my Self with it; to examine it in order to see whether or not it was true; or to ask why it was written in this one. way and in no other way. But apart from this, there were many old rhymes in Mr. Nahum's book-nursery things which I had known since I knew anything. And I still have an old childish love for rhymes and jingles like them.

But what about the others? I began to ponder. After being so many hours alone in Mr. Nahum's room, among his secret belongings, I almost felt his presence there. When your mind is sunk in study, it is as if you were in a dream. But you cannot tell where, or in whose company, you may wake out of a dream. I remember one sultry afternoon being started out of my wits by a sudden clap of thunder. I looked up, to find the whole room black, zizzag, and strange, and for a moment I fancied Mr. Nahum was actually there behind me; and not a friendly Mr. Nahum.

That is mere fancy; though in other ways he became so real to me at last that I would do things as if he had asked me to do them. For this reason, I think, I persevered with his book, swallowing some of the poems as if they were physic, simply because he had written them there. But the more I read, the more I came to enjoy them for their own sakes. Not all of them, of course. But I did see this, that like a carpenter who

makes a table, a man who has written a poem has written it like that on purpose.

With this thought in my head I tried one day to alter the words of one or two of the simple and easy poems; or to put the words in a different order. And I found by so doing that you not only altered the sound of the poem, but that even the slightest alteration in the sound a little changed the sense. Either you lost something of the tune and runningness; or the words did not clash right; or you blurred the picture the words gave you; or some half-hidden meaning vanished away. I don't mean that every poem is perfect; but only that when I changed them it was almost always very much for the worse. I was very slow in all this; but, still, I went on. No. III, I remember, was the old nursery jingle, “Old King Cole" :

Old King Cole was a merry old soul,
And a merry old soul was he;

He called for his pipe,

And he called for his bowl,

And he called for his fiddlers three. . . .

Now, suppose, instead of these four lines of the rhyme you put :—

Old King Cole was a jolly old man,

The jolliest old man alive;

He called for his cup, and he called for a pipe

And he called for his fiddlers five.

By so doing you have actually added two extra fiddlers; and yet somehow you have taken away some of the old three's music. Or you may put:

"Cole the First was now a monarch advanced in

age, and of a convivial temperament. On any festive occasion he would bid his retainers bring him his goblet and smoking materials, and would command his musicians to entertain him on their violins: which they did."

Well, all the facts are there and many more words, but scarcely a trace of my old King Cole, and not a single tweedle-eedle of the fiddling. Would anyone trouble

to learn that by heart?

Now underneath this rhyme Mr. Nahum had written a sort of historical account of King Cole, a good deal of it in German and other languages. All I could make out of it was this: if ever a King Cole inhabited the world, he probably had another name; that he lived too far back in history for anyone to make sure when he had lived or that he had lived at all; and that his "pipe" and "bowl" probably stand for objects much more mysterious and far less common.

Having the rhyme quite free to myself, I didn't mind reading this; but if ever I have to give up either, I shall keep the rhyme.

Having discovered, then, that every poem must have been written as it was written, on purpose, I took a little more pains with those I cared for least. In some even then I could not piece out the meaning; in others I could not easily catch the beat and rhythm and tune. But I learned to read them very slowly, so as fully and quietly to fill up the time allowed for each line and to listen to its music, and to see and hear all that the words were saying.

Then, too, what Miss Taroone had said came back to my mind. Even when Mr. Nahum's poems were about real things and places and people, they were still only of places and people the words made for me in my mind. I must, that is, myself imagine all they told. And I found that the mention in a poem even of quite common

and familiar things—such as a star, or a buttercup, or a beetle did not bring into the mind quite the same kind of images of them as the things and creatures themselves do in the naked eye.

This was one of the earliest poems in Mr. Nahum's book. I had often, of course, seen the shadows of evening every grass-blade or pebble casts its own; but these words not only called them vividly into my mind, but set shadows there (shadows across the sky) that I had never really seen at all-with my own eyes I mean. I discovered afterwards, also, that shadows are only the absence of light, though light is needed to make them visible. Just the same, again, with the sailors in the same poem:

Guard the sailors tossing

On the deep blue sea. . .

They are plain and common words, but their order here is the poem's only, and the effect they had on me, and still have, is different from the effect of any other words on the same subject. Though, too, like Mr. Nahum, I have now seen something of the world (have been seasick and nearly drowned) I have never forgotten those imaginary sailors, or that imaginary sea; can still hear the waves lapping against that (unmentioned) ship's thin wooden walls, as if I myself were sleeping there, down below.

So what I then read has remained a clear and single remembrance, as if I myself had seen it in a world made