and stream of our old haunts; and
after I got home I told Alice all about it.

"He seems quite a remarkable fellow," said I, "and a perfect specimen of
the pusher and hustler--a quick-witted man of affairs. If he is ever
put down, he can't be kept down."

"I think I prefer a more refined type of man," said Alice.

"In the sixteenth century," I went on with that excessive perspicacity
which our wives have to put up with, "he'd have been a Drake or a
Dampier; in the seventeenth, the commander of a privateer or slaver; in
this age, I shall not be at all surprised if he turns out a great
railway or financial magnate. It's like a whiff of boyhood to talk with
him; though he's a greatly different sort of man from what I should have
expected to find him. I think you'll like him."

She seemed dubious about this. Our wives instinctively disapprove of
people we used to know prior to that happy meeting which led to
marriage. This prejudice, for some reason, is stronger against our
feminine acquaintances than the others. I am not analytical enough to do
more than point out this feeling, which will, I think, be admitted by
all husbands to exist.

"That sort of man," said she, "lacks the qualities of bravery and
intrepidity which make up a Drake or a Dampier. They are so a-scheming
and calculating!"

"The last time I saw Jim until to-day," said I, "he did something which
seems to show that he had those more admirable qualities."

Then I told her that story of Jim and the mad dog, which is remembered
in Pleasant Valley to this day. Some say the dog was not mad; but I, who
saw his terrible, insane look as he came snapping and frothing down the
road, believe that he was. Jim had left the school for a year or so, and
I was a "big boy" ready to leave it. It was at four one afternoon, and
as the children filed into the road, there met them the shouts of men
and cries of "Run! Run! Mad dog!"

The children scattered like a covey of quail; but a pair of little
five-year-olds, forgotten by the others, walked on hand in hand, looking
into each other's faces, right toward the poor crazed, hunted brute,
which trotted slowly toward the children, gnashing its frothing jaws at
sticks and weeds, at everything it met, ready to bury its teeth in the
first baby to come within reach.

A young man with a canvasser's portfolio stood behind a fence over which
he had jumped to avoid the dog. Suddenly he saw the children, knew their
danger, and lea