WHAT THE PHOTOGRAPH TOLDGerald Allingham had left college with the ambition to be an author; to which end he had sat down for the best part of a year and inked a vast heap of paper with the feelings and doings of his first twenty years of life in a fashion then much in vogue. This portentous work—two hundred thousand words it ran to—was the first volume of a projected trilogy. It was a portrait of Youth. The second volume, which was to be written next year, would represent Middle Life. The third would show the hero in his old age, tested and purified in the crucible of experience, and grown ever so wise. That would be written the following year, and the author would then be famous.
It was a marvelous compilation, that first volume. All the quaintly significant perceptions and feelings of
