doing the least harm. Men who thought such things of themselves laughed
at him behind his back, and wondered vaguely why he got promotion. It
never occurred to them to reflect that "old Jem" invariably acquitted
himself well in each new position thrust upon him by a persistently kind
fortune; they contented themselves with an indefinite conviction that
each severally could have done better, as is the way of clever young men.
One of the many mysteries, by the way, which will have to be cleared up
in a busy hereafter is that appertaining to brilliant boys, clever
undergraduates, and gifted young men. What becomes of them? There are
hundreds at school at this moment--we have it from their own parents;
hundreds more at Oxford and Cambridge--we have it from themselves. In a
few years they will be absorbed in a world of men very much inferior to
themselves (by their own showing), and will be no more seen.

Jem Agar had never been a clever boy. He was not a clever man. But--and
mark ye this--he knew it. The result of this knowledge was that he did
what he could in the present with the present, and did not indefinitely
postpone astonishing the universe, as most of us do, until some future
date.

At this time he was banished, as some would take it. Banished to the top
of a pass which was nought else than a footway between two empires. Forty
miles from men of his own race, this man was one of those who either have
no thoughts or no wish to impart them; for this racial solitude, which is
an emotion fully explored by many in India, in no way affected his
nerves. Some say that they get jumpy, others aver that they begin to lose
their national characteristics and develop barbarous proclivities, while
one Woods-and-Forests man known to some of us resigned because he had a
buzzing in the head during the long solitary, silent evenings.