Perkins, as seen either within or without the Putney cottage,
correspond with that which fiction assigns to a hero of romance. His
frame was small and slight, his complexion pale, his hair weak and
thin, his manner diffident, awkward, almost ungainly, but that its
thorough courtesy and good-nature were so obvious and unaffected. In
general society people passed him over as a shy, harmless, unmeaning
little man; but those who really knew him affirmed that his courage
was not to be damped, nor his nerve shaken, by extremity of
danger--that he was always ready with succour for the needy, with
sympathy for the sorrowful. In short, as they tersely put it, that
"his heart was in the right place."

For half-a-dozen terms at Oxford he and Dick had been inseparable.
Their intimacy, none the less close for dissimilarity of tastes and
pursuits, since Perkins was a reading man, and Dick a "fast" one, had
been still more firmly soldered by a long vacation spent together in
Norway, and a "thrilling tableau," as Dick called it, to which their
expedition gave rise. Had Simon Perkins's heart been no stouter than
his slender person, his companion must have died a damp death, and
this story would never have been told.

The young men were in one of the most picturesque parts of that wild
and beautiful country, created, as it would seem, for the express
gratification of the fisherman and the landscape painter; Simon
Perkins, an artist in his very soul, wholly engrossed by the sketch of
a mountain, Dick Stanmore equally absorbed in fishing a pool. Scarce
twenty yards apart, neither was conscious, for the moment, of the
other's existence; Simon, indeed, being in spirit some seven thousand
feet above the level of the sea, putting more ochre into the virgin
snow that crested his topmost peak, and Dick deftly dropping a fly,