"I'd rather you left millin' alone, Boy Jim," said he, "and so had
the missus; but if mill you must, it will not be my fault if you
cannot hold up your hands to anything in the south country."

And it was not long before he made good his promise.

I have said already that Boy Jim had no love for his books, but by
that I meant school-books, for when it came to the reading of
romances or of anything which had a touch of gallantry or adventure,
there was no tearing him away from it until it was finished. When
such a book came into his hands, Friar's Oak and the smithy became a
dream to him, and his life was spent out upon the ocean or wandering
over the broad continents with his heroes. And he would draw me
into his enthusiasms also, so that I was glad to play Friday to his
Crusoe when he proclaimed that the Clump at Clayton was a desert
island, and that we were cast upon it for a week. But when I found
that we were actually to sleep out there without covering every
night, and that he proposed that our food should be the sheep of the
Downs (wild goats he called them) cooked upon a fire, which was to
be made by the rubbing together of two sticks, my heart failed me,
and on the very first night I crept away to my mother. But Jim
stayed out there for the whole weary week--a wet week it was, too!--
and came back at the end of it looking a deal wilder and dirtier
than his hero does in the picture-books. It is well that he had
only promised to stay a week, for, if it had been a month, he would
have died of cold and hunger before his pride would have let him
come home.

His pride!--that was the deepest thing in all Jim's nature. It is a
mixed quality to my mind, half a virtue and half a vice: a virtue