He used to play to me in the magic hour before bedtime, when, in the summer, the red sun threw long shadows across the lawn, and in winter the fire burned brighter and brighter in the hearth.  This was the hour when all the interminable squabbles of the schoolroom were forgotten, and even the noisiest of us would hush his voice to listen drowsily to a fairy-tale, or to watch the palaces raise aloft their minarets, and crumble to dull red ash in the heart of the fire.  It was then that I would see him sitting astride of the fireguard and puffing out his cheeks over his shining flute.  Even in the most thrilling moments of fairy stories, when Cinderella lost her crystal slipper or Sister Ann saw the cloud of dust from the summit of Bluebeard’s tower, his shrill melodies would ring in my ears and p. 190quicken my sleepy senses with the desire to hear more of this enchanted music.  I knew that it was real magic, but I did not find it strange, because as far as I knew I had heard it all my life.  Perhaps he had played to me when I yet lay in my cradle, and watched the night-light winking on the nursery ceiling; but I did not try to remember whether this was so.  I was content to accept my strange musician as a fact of my existence, and to feel a sense of loss on the rare evenings when he failed me.  I did not know how to dance, but sometimes I would tap my feet on the floor in time to the music, till some one would tell me not to fidget.  For no one else would either see him or hear him, which proved that it was real magic, and flattered my sense of possession.  It was evident that he came for me alone.

The years passed, and in due course the imaginative graces of my childhood were destroyed by the boys of my own age at school.  They compelled me to exchange a hundred star-roofed palaces, three distinct kingdoms of dreams, and my enchanted p. 191flute-player for a threadbare habit of mimicry that left me cold and unprotected from the winds in the large places of life.  There was something at once pathetic and ridiculous in our childish efforts to imitate our elders, but as it seemed that our masters and grown-up relatives were in the conspiracy to make us materialistically wise before our time, a boy would have needed a rare force of character to linger with his childhood and refuse to ape the man.  So, for a while, I saw my glad musician no more, though sometimes I thought I heard him playing far away, and the child within me was warmed and encouraged even while my new-found manhood was condemning the weakness.  I knew now that no man worthy of the name was escorted through life by a fairy flute-player, and that dreamers and wool-gatherers invariably sank to be poets and musicians, persons who wear bowler-hats with frock-coats, have no crease in their trousers, and come to a bad end.  Fortunately, all education that is repressive rather than stimulating is only skin-deep, and it was inevitable that sooner or later I should p. 192meet the flute-player again.  One Saturday afternoon in high summer I avoided cricket and went for a long walk in the woods, moved by a spirit of revolt against all the traditions and conventions of boy-life; and presently, in a mossy clearing, all splashed and wetted by little pools of sunlight, I found him playing to an audience of two squirrels and a redstart.  When he saw me he winked the eye that glittered over his parading fingers, as though he had left me only five minutes before, but I had not listened long before I realised that I must pay the price of my infidelity.  It was the old music and the old magic, but try as I might I could not hear it so clearly as I had when I was a child.  The continuity of my faith had been broken, and though he was willing to forgive, I myself could not forget those dark years of doubt and denial............