“I first met Oscar Wilde in the early part of 1868 at Portora Royal School.  He was thirteen or fourteen years of age.  His long straight fair hair was a striking feature of his appearance.  He was then, as he remained for some years after, extremely boyish in nature, very mobile, almost restless when out of the schoolroom.  Yet he took no part in the school games at any time.  Now and then he would be seen in one of the school boats on Loch Erne:  yet he was a poor hand at an oar.

“Even as a schoolboy he was an excellent talker:  his descriptive power being far above the average, and his humorous exaggerations of school occurrences always highly amusing.

“A favourite place for the boys to sit and gossip in the late afternoon in winter time was round a stove which stood in ’The Stone Hall.’  Here Oscar was at his best; although his brother Willie was perhaps in those days even better than he was at telling a story.

“Oscar would frequently vary the entertainment by giving us extremely quaint illustrations of holy people in stained-glass attitudes:  his power of twisting his limbs into weird contortions being very great.  (I am told that Sir William Wilde, his father, possessed the same power.) It must not be thought, however, that there was any suggestion of irreverence in the exhibition.

“At one of these gatherings, about the year 1870, I remember a discussion taking place about an ecclesiastical prosecution that made a considerable stir at the time.  Oscar was present, and full of the mysterious nature of the Court of Arches; he told us there was nothing he would like better in after life than to be the hero of such a cause celebre and to go down to posterity as the defendant in such a case as ‘Regina versus Wilde!’

“At school he was almost always called ’Oscar’—­but he had a nick-name, ‘Grey-crow,’ which the boys would call him when they wished to annoy him, and which he resented greatly.  It was derived in some mysterious way from the name of an island in the Upper Loch Erne, within easy reach of the school by boat.

“It was some little time before he left Portora that the boys got to know of his full name, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.  Just at the close of his school career he won the ‘Carpenter’ Greek Testament Prize,—­and on presentation day was called up to the dais by Dr. Steele, by all his names—­much to Oscar’s annoyance; for a great deal of schoolboy chaff followed.

“He was always generous, kindly, good-tempered.  I remember he and myself were on one occasion mounted as opposing jockeys on the backs of two bigger boys in what we called a ‘tournament,’ held in one of the class-rooms.  Oscar and his horse were thrown, and the result was a broken arm for Wilde.  Knowing that it was an accident, he did not let it make any difference in our friendship.

“He had, I think, no very special chums while at school.  I was perhaps as friendly with him all through as anybody, though his junior in class by a year....