CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCES A LOVER OF THE PICTURESQUE Our adventures hover round us like bees round the hive when preparing to swarm .-- MAETERLINCK.
From boyhood Malcolm Herrick had been a lover of the picturesque.

In secret he prided himself on possessing the artistic faculty, and yet, except in the nursery, he had never drawn a line, or later on spoilt canvas and daubed himself in oils under the idea that he was an embryo Millais or Turner.

But nevertheless he had the seeing eye, and could find beauty where more prosaic people could only see barrenness: a stubble field newly turned up by the plough moved him to admiration, while a Surrey lane, with a gate swinging back on its hinges, and a bowed old man carrying faggots, in the smoky light of an October evening, gave him a feeling akin to ecstasy.

More than one of his school-fellows remembered how, even in the cricket field, he would stand as though transfixed, looking at the storm clouds, with their steely edges, coming up behind the copse, but the palms of his hands were outstretched and he never failed to catch the ball.
"Nature intended me for an artist or a poet," Malcolm would say, for he was given at times to a hard, merciless introspection, when he took himself and his motives to pieces, "but circumstances have called me to the bar.

To be sure I have never held a brief, and my tastes are purely literary, but all the same I am a member of the legal profession." Malcolm Herrick used his Englishman's right of grumbling to a large extent; with a sort of bitter and acrid humility, he would accuse himself of having missed his vocation and his rightful heritage, of being neither "fish, flesh, nor good red herring;" nevertheless his post for the last two years had pleased him well: he was connected with a certain large literary society which gave his legal wits plenty of scope.