ation, as I measured it, to
the poor spot on which we stood, were in mortal danger of their lives;
so that news of their having been killed would perhaps be already on the
way. They might well have been military, these impressively exposed
characters, since my friend's name was Napier, or Nappie as he was
called at the school, and since, I may add also, there attached to him,
in my eyes, the glamour of an altogether new emphasis of type. The
English boys within our ken since our coming abroad had been of the
fewest--the Fezandie youths, whether English or American, besides being
but scantly boys, had been so lost, on that scene, in our heap of
disparities; and it pressed upon me after a fashion of its own that
those we had known in New York, and all aware of their varieties and
"personalities" as one had supposed one's self, had in no case
challenged the restless "placing" impulse with any such force as the
finished little Nappie. They had not been, as he was by the very
perversity of his finish, resultants of forces at all--or comparatively
speaking; it was as if their producing elements had been simple and few,
whereas behind this more mixed and, as we have learnt to say, evolved
companion (his very simplicities, his gaps of possibility, being still
evolved), there massed itself I couldn't have said what protective
social order, what tangled creative complexity. Why I should have
thought him almost Indian of stamp and hue because his English parents
were of the so general Indian peril is more than I can say; yet I have
his exotic and above all his bold, his imaginably even "bad," young
face, finely unacquainted with law, before me at this hour quite
undimmed--announcing, as I conceived it, and quite as a shock, any
awful adventure one would, as well as something that I must even at the
time have vaguely taken as the play of the "passions." He vanishes, and
I dare say I but make him over, as I make everything; and he must have
led his life, whatever it was to become, with the least possible waiting
on the hour or the major consequence and no waste of energy at all in
mooning, no patience with any substitute for his very own humour. We had
another schoolmate, this one native to the soil, whose references were
with the last vividness local and who was yet to escape with brilliancy
in the aftertime the smallest shadow of effacement. His most direct
reference at that season was to the principal pastry-cook's of the town,
an