with the willing
help of two men and of the landlady, in about three hours we had Halley
in his room. But a hideous walk it was down the canon, every step we
made wringing a groan from the poor fellow except when he fainted from
pain.

The doctor did not arrive till the following morning, by which time the
wounds were in a dreadful condition, and it was touch and go for life,
while the doctor at first had no hope of saving the arm. But youth, and
time, and a strong constitution pulled him through, and in a couple of
weeks he was strong enough to describe to me how he had fallen in with
the bear.

He had gone, it seemed, not to where I had seen the animal, but up a
branch canon. At no great distance up he met the beast, making its way
leisurely across the creek, and, in his excitement, he fired both
barrels into the bear's shoulder; and then the same thing happened that
had happened to me--those refilled cartridges had jammed, and there was
nothing for it but to run for his life. Luckily he had badly lamed the
animal, or his chance of escape would have been _nil_, and, as it was,
in another two hundred yards the bear would have been into him.

Some days after the accident, the first day that I could leave Halley's
bedside, I went out to see if it was possible to get the skin of the
bear, but I found it badly torn, maybe by coyotes, and all that could be
got as trophies were his claws.

There they are now, hanging over the pipe-rack by the fireplace in my
snuggery in dear old England.

IV

AN ADVENTURE IN ITALY

_A Fourth-form Boy's Holiday Yarn_

Last winter I had a stroke of real good luck. As a rule I'm not one of
the lucky ones; but this time, for once, Fortune smiled on me--as old
Crabtree says, when he twigs some slip in my exercise, but can't be
quite sure that I had borrowed another fellow's, just to see how much
better mine was than his!

It was this way. It was a beastly wet afternoon, and the Head wouldn't
give me leave to go to the village. But I was bound to go, for I wanted
some wire to finish a cage I was making for my dormouse, who was running
loose in my play-box and making everything in an awful mess. So I
slipped out, and, of course, got soaked.

I couldn't go and change when I came back with the wire, as Crabtree
would then have twigged that I'd been out in the rain. So the end of it
was that I caught a chill and had to go into the infirmary. I was
awfully bad for a bit, and went