CYRIL SAVOURY’S FIRST job, after he left school, was in St. John’s, at the Arts and Culture Centre, where his uncle William secured for him a temporary position as a security guard, with a grey uniform that fit him perfectly, a brown leather belt, a walkie-talkie, and a hat with such a military cast that Cyril stopped at his reflection in the lobby glass; it was in this uniform that Cyril presented himself for work on October 14th, for a show on loan from the German National Museum, featuring twenty prints by Albrecht Dürer, and although he had no knowledge of the underlying themes of Dürer’s work, Cyril found himself, on the very first morning of his employment, mesmerized, carefully examining the cross-hatching—the fine parallel and intersecting lines of shading—on the thigh of a horse in the engraving Knight, Death, and Devil; after lunch the gallery was full, for the show had been praised in the Evening Telegram and in the Daily News, and Cyril felt himself being drawn back through the crowds to the same work, where the cross-hatching was so dense, so varied, so thick here and so thin there, so magnificently cross-hatched everywhere that he did not see, developing around him, within the web of his security, the shambles of a public gallery left without any supervision at all: there was a young man standing so close to Melencolia that he could breathe upon it, a boy from Bay Roberts touching the frame of St. Eustache, and young men smirking in front of Adam and Eve—Cyril saw none of this, he saw only that he was tapped on the shoulder by the Chief of Security, that he was terminated for cause that very afternoon, that he lost his uniform, his belt, his walkie-talkie, and the military hat but, somehow, he had not lost his self-esteem, for with the few dollars he was given for his labours, he bought that day on Duckworth Street a set of pencils and a hand-sharpener, and in the evening he drew, hesitatingly at first but then with confidence, a true likeness of his own hand and sleeve, and the next day he woke up early and drew, from memory, the laundry on Hilda Cluett’s line, with the northeast wind snapping at the cotton sheets like a lost opportunity, and he drew the rockface Iron Skull and the Burin shore, and he cross-hatched it, as Albrecht Dürer would have done, had he been Cyril Savoury.