ne came. There was a door at one side
painted with our number. We prowled in, and I found a cook asleep, and
ordered him to give us food. Then I climbed to the top of the Wall, and
looked out over the Pict country, and I--thought,' said Parnesius. 'The
bricked-up arch with "Finish!" on the plaster was what shook me, for I
was not much more than a boy.'

'What a shame!' said Una. 'But did you feel happy after you'd had a
good----' Dan stopped her with a nudge.

'Happy?' said Parnesius. 'When the men of the Cohort I was to command
came back unhelmeted from the cock-fight, their birds under their arms,
and asked me who I was? No, I was not happy; but I made my new Cohort
unhappy too ... I wrote my Mother I was happy, but, oh, my friends'--he
stretched arms over bare knees--'I would not wish my worst enemy to
suffer as I suffered through my first months on the Wall. Remember this:
among the officers was scarcely one, except myself (and I thought I had
lost the favour of Maximus, my General), scarcely one who had not done
something of wrong or folly. Either he had killed a man, or taken money,
or insulted the magistrates, or blasphemed the Gods, and so had been
sent to the Wall as a hiding-place from shame or fear. And the men were
as the officers. Remember, also, that the Wall was manned by every breed
and race in the Empire. No two towers spoke the same tongue, or
worshipped the same Gods. In one thing only we were all equal. No matter
what arms we had used before we came to the Wall, _on_ the Wall we were
all archers, like the Scythians. The Pict cannot run away from the
arrow, or crawl under it. He is a bowman himself. _He_ knows!'

'I suppose you were fighting Picts all the time,' said Dan.

'Picts seldom fight. I never saw a fighting Pict for half a year. The
tame Picts told us they had all gone North.'

'What is a tame Pict?' said Dan.

'A Pict--there were many such--who speaks a few words of our tongue, and
slips across the Wall to sell ponies and wolf-hounds. Without a horse
and a dog, _and_ a friend, man would perish. The Gods gave me all three,
and there is no gift like friendship. Remember this'--Parnesius turned
to Dan--'when you become a young man. For your fate will turn on the
first true friend you make.'

'He means,' said Puck, grinning, 'that if you try to make yourself a
decent chap when you're young, you'll make rather decent friends when
you grow up. If you're a beast, you'll have beastly friends.