THE Fates arranged Barney Bill's entrance late on a Saturday afternoon in August.

It was not dramatic.

It was merely casual.

They laid the scene in the brickfield.
It had rained all day, and now there was sullen clearance.

Paul, who had been bathing with some factory boys in the not very savoury canal a mile or so distant, had wandered mechanically to his brickfield library, which, by means of some scavenging process, he managed to keep meagrely replenished.