The notion of communicating this occurrence with self-depreciatory humour to the “Slowworm of Lenty” completed his restoration to good spirits. By the little device of seeing himself in a humorous and yet not in a ridiculous light, he crossed the moat that separated him from his accustomed stronghold, and pulled up the drawbridge after him.

“I’ll tell him about the hedgehog on Wednesday,” he thought, “when I meet him at the school-treat.” And thinking of Jason’s goblinish laughter when he should be telling him the tale, Wolf entirely forgot the sensations he had recently received from that same sound.

With a mind once more adjusted and fortified to deal with existence, he advanced rapidly towards the outskirts of Blacksod. He knew every mark, every sign of the way as he came along. In a darkness far deeper than this darkness he would have known them, those grotesque and insignificant little things that arrest a person’s attention for so many unknown reasons, as he follows a familiar road.