in holding a man out of the dirt; a vice in making it hard for him
to rise when once he has fallen. Jim was proud down to the very
marrow of his bones. You remember the guinea that the young lord
had thrown him from the box of the coach? Two days later somebody
picked it from the roadside mud. Jim only had seen where it had
fallen, and he would not deign even to point it out to a beggar.
Nor would he stoop to give a reason in such a case, but would answer
all remonstrances with a curl of his lip and a flash of his dark
eyes. Even at school he was the same, with such a sense of his own
dignity, that other folk had to think of it too. He might say, as
he did say, that a right angle was a proper sort of angle, or put
Panama in Sicily, but old Joshua Allen would as soon have thought of
raising his cane against him as he would of letting me off if I had
said as much. And so it was that, although Jim was the son of
nobody, and I of a King's officer, it always seemed to me to have
been a condescension on his part that he should have chosen me as
his friend.

It was this pride of Boy Jim's which led to an adventure which makes
me shiver now when I think of it.

It happened in the August of '99, or it may have been in the early
days of September; but I remember that we heard the cuckoo in
Patcham Wood, and that Jim said that perhaps it was the last of him.
I was still at school, but Jim had left, he being nigh sixteen and I
thirteen. It was my Saturday half-holiday, and we spent it, as we
often did, out upon the Downs. Our favourite place was beyond
Wolstonbury, where we could stretch ourselves upon the soft,
springy, chalk grass among the plump little Southdown sheep,
chatting with the shepherds, as they leaned upon their queer old