The old town, like human beings, had its moods of excited reminiscence. Why should it not? Now brooding, now suddenly waking into lightning flashes of dramatic history, so that everyone in the place, scarcely knowing why, began to dream of the old days when armoured men fought all the way down the High Street and up again, and the Black Bishop rode on his great horse to the edge of the rock where the cloisters now are and saw the beggarly heretics flung over far down into the waters below; and the peasants had their fair up on the hill above the Pol (and were all so be-drunken that they set the town on fire, so that three-quarters of it was burnt to the ground in 1457, as everyone knows, and the cathedral itself only saved by a miracle); and the meeting of the maidens in the market-place, who brought a flag which they had worked to send to Monmouth in Bridgewater; and the last drowning of a witch—old Mother Huckepinch—in the Pol in 1723; and so farther and farther and farther. History, history, history—it lay thick as dust about the town, and only needed a little stirring of the town’s soil to send the dust up into people’s eyes, making them think of times dead and gone and ghosts closer still about them, perhaps, than they cared to think.

It must have been during one of these moods of the town that Jeremy was caught. He was, as all readers of these reminiscences of his early days will have discovered, a two-sided boy, and he had already a strange, secret interior life within his very healthy and normal exterior one. There is nothing harder, perhaps, in our own experience than to look back and discover when it was that that secret life was as it were first confirmed and strengthened by something in the real world that corresponded to it. For some of us that actual moment was so dramatic, so strangely concrete and definite, so friendly (as though it were someone suddenly appearing out of the dark and speaking to us and showing us that we were not alone, either in experience or desire as we had supposed) that we cannot possibly forget its precise time and colour. With others, two or three occasions can claim to have worked the miracle; with others again that confirmation was gradual, arising out of no definite incident, but rather creeping forward like a finger of the rising sun, slowly lighting one’s path and showing one where to go.

With Jeremy there had been already definite signs—his adventure years ago with the sea captain, his days on the beach at Rafiel, his friendship with Uncle Samuel; but his actual realization of something strange and mysterious, ancient and yet present, friendly and yet hostile, reassuring and yet terrifying, active and yet quiescent, his recognition of “that life beyond the wall,” dated quite definitely from his discovery of Saladin and his strange adventure in the cathedral.

As I have already said on that particular week—the last week of his Christmas holidays—the town was up to its tricks. Had it not been, Jeremy would surely never have felt the spirit of adventure so strongly, never gone into the old bookshop, never—but you shall hear.

He was very quiet and behaving beautifully during that last week—yes, beautifully, until the last three days when the devil (who is always on the wait for young gentlemen when they are about to return to school), or the town, or Uncle Samuel or something or somebody suddenly got hold of him and led him the strangest dance. It must have been the devil that led to the adventure of the night raiders (and that is quite another story); but again it might have been the old town—nobody knows. How can anybody know thirty years after it was all over and done with?

Until those last three days Jeremy behaved like an angel—that is, he listened to Aunt Amy and washed his hands when she told him to; he did not tease his little sister Barbara, nor hide Helen’s hair ribbons; he allowed Mary to go walking with him and gave Miss Jones a present when she returned from her holiday. He felt, perhaps, that as the holidays had begun so awfully with that terrible disaster of the Christmas presents, it was up to him to see that they ended properly. And then he was truly a good little boy who wanted things to go well and everyone to be comfortable and happy, only so strangely moods would creep in, and desires and ambitions, and grown-up people would have such an amazing point of view about boys and misunderstand their natural impulses so dreadfully—what he meant was that if he were grown up and had a boy “he wouldn’t be such an ass!”

The trouble of these last three days all began by his suddenly remembering that he had never read his holiday task. He did not remember of himself, but was reminded by Bill Bartlett, whom he met in the High Street, who said that the last two days had been miserable for him by having to swot at his rotten holiday task and that he didn’t know anything about it now!

Jeremy had completely forgotten his. He hurried home and dragged it forth from its deserted corner. “The Talisman: A Tale of the Crusades,” by Sir Walter Scott, Bart.

It was a horrible-looking book with a dark green cover, no pictures, and rows of notes at the end. Jeremy was not as yet a very great reader of anything, being slow and lazy about it and very eager to skip the difficult words.

His favourite two books were “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Swiss Family Robinson,” simply because, in those books, people invented things in a jolly way. And after all, any day one might be on a desert island, and it was useful to know what to do. Of “Sir Walter Scott, Bart.,” he had never in his life heard, nor did he wish to hear of him. Nevertheless, something must be done. Old Thompson took holiday tasks very seriously indeed. Jeremy’s report last term had not been a very good one, and father’s eye was upon him.

His first idea was that he would get Uncle Samuel to tell him the story; but when he showed his uncle the book, that gentleman waved his paint-brush in the air and said that “Walter was a fine old gentleman who died game, but a rotten writer, and it was a shame to make kids wade through his abominable prose.” There was, then, no hope here. Jeremy looked at the book, read half a page, and then threw it at Hamlet.

But the stern truth of the matter was that in such a matter as this, and indeed in most of the concerns of his daily life, he resembled a spy working his way through the enemy’s camp, surrounded on every side by foes, compelled to consider every movement, doomed to death and dishonour if he were caught. It had come to it now that there was in practical fact nothing that he desired to do that he was not forbidden to do, and because his school life had given him rules and standards that did not belong to his home life, he criticized at every turn. There was, for instance, this affair of walking in the town by himself. He could understand that Helen and Mary should not go by themselves because there was apparently something mysterious and precious in girls that was destroyed were they left alone for a single moment. But a boy! a boy who had travelled by himself all those miles to a distant county; a boy who, in all probability would be the half-back for the school next term, a boy who in another two years would be at a public school!

What it came to, of course, was that he was continually giving his elders the slip; was, indeed, like the spy in the enemy’s country, because every move had to be considered and, at the end, all the excuses ranged in a long row and the most serviceable carefully chosen. And threadbare by now they were becoming!

On this particular afternoon—the first of the last three days of the holidays—he gave Miss Jones and Helen the slip in the market-place. This was to-day easy to do, because it was market day; he knew that Helen was too deeply concerned with herself and her appearance to care whether he were there or no, and that Miss Jones, delighted as she always was with the shops (knowing them by heart and yet never tired of them), would optimistically trust that he would very soon reappear, and at any rate he knew his way home.

He was always delighted with the market on market days. Never, although so constantly repeated, did it lose its savour for him. He adored everything—the cattle and the sheep in their pens, the farmers with their thick broad backs and thick broad sticks talking in such solemn and serious clusters, the avenue down the middle of the market-place where you walked past stall after stall—stalls of vegetables, stalls of meat, stalls of cups and saucers, stalls of china ornaments, stalls of pots and pans, and, best—far best of all—the flower-stalls with their pots of beautiful flowers, their seeds and their tiny plants growing in rows in wooden boxes. But it was not the outside market that was the most truly entrancing. On the right of the market-place there were strange mysterious passages—known to the irreverent as the Catacombs—and here, in a dusk that would, you would have supposed, have precluded any real buying or selling altogether—the true business of the market went on.

It was here, under these dark ages, that in his younger days the toy-shop had enchanted him, and even now, although he would own it to no one alive, the trains and the air-guns seemed to him vastly alluring. There was also a football—too small for him; not at all the football that he wanted to buy—but nevertheless better than nothing at all. He looked at it. The price was eight and sixpence, and he had in his pocket precisely fivepence halfpenny. He sighed, fingered the ball that was hanging in mid-air, and it revolved round and round in the most entrancing manner. The old woman with the moustache who had, it was reputed, ever since the days of Genesis managed the toy-shop, besought him in wheedling tones to purchase it. He could only sigh again, look at it lovingly, twirl it round once more and pass on. He was in that mood when he must buy something—an entrancing, delicious and intoxicating mood, a mood that Helen and Mary were in all the time and would continue to remain in it, like the rest of their sex, until the end, for them, of purses, money and all earthly hopes and ambitions.

Next to the toy-stall was a funny old bookstall. Always hitherto he had passed this; not that it was uninteresting, because the old man who kept the place had coloured prints that he stuck, with pins, into the wooden sides of his booth, and these prints were delightful—funny people in old costumes, coaches stuck in the snow, or a number of stout men tumbling about the floor after drinking too much. But the trouble with Mr. Samuel Porter was that he did not change his prints often enough, being, as anyone could see, a man of lazy and indifferent habits; and when Jeremy had seen the same prints for over a year, he naturally knew them by heart.

On this particular day, however, old Mr. Samuel had changed his prints, and there were some splendid new ones in purples and reds and greens, representing skating on the ice, going up in a balloon, an evening in Vauxhall and the fun of the fair. Jeremy stared at these with open mouth, especially at the fun of the fair, which was most amusing because in it a pig was running away and upsetting everybody, just as it might quite easily do here in the market-place. He stood looking, and Mr. Porter, who wore a faded green hat and large spectacles and hated little boys because they never bought anything, but only teased him and ran away, looked at him out of the corner of his eye and dared him to be cheeky. He had no intention whatever of being cheeky; he stared at the books, all so broken and old and melancholy, and thought what a dreary thing having to read was, and how unfortunate about his holiday task, and how silly of him to have thought of it just at that moment and so spoiled his afternoon.

He would then have passed on had it not been by the strangest coincidence that at that very instant his eye fell on a little pile of books at the front of the stall, and the book on the top of the pile had the very name of his holiday task: “The Talisman,” by Sir Walter Scott, Bart. It was the strangest looking book, very different indeed from the book at home.

He stared at it as though it was a lucky charm. How strange that it should be there and appearing so oddly different from the book at home. It was dressed in shabby and faded yellow covers; he picked it up. On the outside he read in large letters: “Stead’s Penny Classics!” Penny! Could it be that this book was only a penny? Why, if so, he could buy it and four others like it! This sudden knowledge gave him a new proprietary interest in the book, as when you discover that a stranger at an hotel lives, when at home, in your own street! Opening the little book he saw that the print was very small indeed, that the lines were crooked and irregular, here very black and there only a dim grey. But in the very fact of this faint print there was something mysterious and appealing. No notes here, of course, and no undue emphasis on this “Scott, Bart.” man, simply “The Talisman,” short and sweet.

Old Mr. Porter, observing the unusual sight of a small boy actually taking a book in his hands and reading it, was interested. He had seen the small boy often enough, and although he would never admit it to himself, had liked his look of sturdy independence and healthy self-assurance. He had not thought that the boy was a reader. He leaned forward:

“Only a penny,” he wheezed (he suffered terribly from asthma, and the boys of the town used to call after him “Old Barrel Organ”), “and just the story for a boy like you.”

“I’ll have it,” said Jeremy with sudden pride. He was of half a mind to buy some of the others—he saw that one more was by “Scott, Bart.”—but no. He would see how this one was before he ventured any farther.

He walked off with his prize.