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to start with, the stories that dealt with magic, and then the
others; and those he liked he read again and again. He could
think of nothing else. He forgot the life about him. He had
to be called two or three times before he would come to his
dinner. Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in
the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he
was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of
life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself
an unreal world which would make the real world of every
day a source of bitter disappointment. Presently he began to
read other things. His brain was precocious. His uncle and
aunt, seeing that he occupied himself and neither worried
nor made a noise, ceased to trouble themselves about him.
Mr. Carey had so many books that he did not know them,
and as he read little he forgot the odd lots he had bought at
one time and another because they were cheap. Haphazard
among the sermons and homilies, the travels, the lives of
the Saints, the Fathers, the histories of the church, were old-
fashioned novels; and these Philip at last discovered. He
chose them by their titles, and the first he read was The Lan-
cashire Witches, and then he read The Admirable Crichton,
and then many more. Whenever he started a book with two
solitary travellers riding along the brink of a desperate ra-
vine he knew he was safe.
The summer was come now, and the gardener, an old
sailor, made him a hammock and fixed it up for him in the
branches of a weeping willow. And here for long hours he
lay, hidden from anyone who might come to the vicarage,
reading, reading passionately. Time passed and it was July;

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