then Clearwater, but did not find you till this
morning. For reasons too long to repeat, my mother warned Hanky and
Panky that you would be in the temple; whereon Hanky tried to get you
into his clutches. Happily he failed, but if I had known what he was
doing I should have arrested you before the service. I ought to have
done this, but I wanted you to win your wager, and I shall get you safely
away in spite of them. My mother will not like my having let you hear
Hanky's sermon and declare yourself."

"You half told me not to say who I was."

"Yes, but I was delighted when you disobeyed me."

"I did it very badly. I never rise to great occasions, I always fall to
them, but these things must come as they come."

"You did it as well as it could be done, and good will come of it."

"And now," he continued, "describe exactly all that passed between you
and the Professors. On which side of Panky did Hanky sit, and did they
sit north and south or east and west? How did you get--oh yes, I know
that--you told them it would be of no further use to them. Tell me all
else you can."

My father said that the Professors were sitting pretty well east and
west, so that Hanky, who was on the east side, nearest the mountains, had
Panky, who was on the Sunch'ston side, on his right hand. George made a
note of this. My father then told what the reader already knows, but
when he came to the measurement of the boots, George said, "Take your
boots off," and began taking off his own. "Foot for foot," said he, "we
are not father and son, but brothers. Yours will fit me; they are less
worn than mine, but I daresay you will not mind that."

On this George _ex abundanti cautela_ knocked a nail out of the right
boot that he had been wearing and changed boots with my father; but he
thought it more plausible not to knock out exactly the same nail that was
missing on my father's boot. When the change was made, each found--or
said he found--the other's boots quite comfortable.

My father all the time felt as though he were a basket given to a dog.
The dog had got him, was proud of him, and no one must try to take him
away. The promptitude with which George took to him, the obvious
pleasure he had in "running" him, his quick judgement, verging as it
should towards rashness, his confidence that my father trusted him
without reserve, the conviction of perfect openness that was conveyed by
the way in which his eyes never budged from