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. In his leisure hours he wrote moderately well-
expressed papers on all sorts of social subjects with a pithy
raciness and command of language that excited a good deal of
comment.

Herrick was a clever fellow, people said; "he would make his mark
when he was older, and had got rid of his cranks;" but all the same
he was not understood by the youth of his generation. "The Fossil,"
as they called him at Lincoln, was hardly modern enough for their