Even the common things he carried with him--the food and the brandy and the loaded pistol--took on exactly that concrete and material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey or a bun with him to bed.

The sword-stick and the brandy-flask, though in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the expressions of his own more healthy romance.

The sword-stick became almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine of the stirrup-cup.

For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane.

The dragon without St.George would not even be grotesque.