self had laid down for me
to follow. For the moment I had lost that clear way. Blinded by my
seeming woes, I had been groping for it, and I had searched in vain.
But now the dizziness was going, and as I sat there in the darkness, my
eyes closed to shut out even the blackness about me, the light came.

After a long while I looked up to see the moon high over the pines on
the eastward ridge, and its yellow light poured into the room, casting
dim shadows over the white walls, and bringing up before me row on row
of spectre desks. The chair I sat in, the table on which I leaned were
real enough. They were part of my to-day, but that dim-lighted room
was the school-house of my boyhood. The fourth of those spectre desks
measuring back from the stove, was where Tim and I sat day after day
together, with heads bowed over open books and eyes aslant. That was
not the same Tim who had passed me a while before, swaggering and
singing in the joy of his conquest; that was not the same Tim who had
stood before me that very afternoon in all the pomp of well-cut
clothes, drawing on his whitened hands a pair of woman's gloves; that
was not the same Tim who by his artful lies had won what had been
denied my stupid, blundering devotion. My Tim was a sturdy little
fellow whose booted legs scarce touched the floor, whose tousled black
head hardly showed above the desk-top. His cheeks would turn crimson
at the thought of woman's gloves on those brown hands. His tongue
would cleave to his mouth in a woman's presence, let alone his lying to
her. That was the real Tim--the rare Tim. To my eyes he was but a
small boy; to my mind he was a mighty man. The first reader that
presented such knotty problems to his intellectual side was but part of
the impedimenta of his youth, and was no fair measure of his real size.
That very day he had fought with me and for me; not because I was in
the right, but because I was his brother.

A lean, cadaverous boy from along the mountain, a born enemy of the
lads of the village, had dared me. I endured his insults until the
time came when further forbearance would have been a disgrace, and then
I closed with him. In the front of the little circle drawn about us,
right outside there in the school-yard, Tim stood. As we pitched to
and fro, the cadaverous boy and I, Tim's shrill cry came to me, and
time and again I caught sight of his white face and small clinched
hands waving wildly. I believe I shou