les.

I used to wish that Jack Penny would not smile, for the effect upon his
smooth boyish countenance was to make him look idiotic. When the doctor
smiled there was a grave kindly benevolent look in his fine
heavily-bearded massive face. When Jimmy smiled it was in a wholesale
fashion, which gave you an opportunity of counting his teeth from the
incisors right back to those known as wisdom-teeth at the angles of his
jaws. He always smiled with all his might and made me think of the man
who said he admired a crocodile because it had such a nice open
countenance.

Jimmy had a nice open countenance and a large mouth; but it in no
respect resembled a crocodile's. His regular teeth were white with a
china whiteness, more than that of ivory, and there was a genuine
good-tempered look about his features which even the distortion produced
by anger did not take away. It was only the rather comic grotesqueness
seen sometimes in the face of a little child when he is what his mother
calls a naughty boy, and distends his mouth and closes his eyes for a
genuine howl.

But Jack Penny had a smile of his own, a weak inane sickly smile that
irritated instead of pleasing you, and made you always feel as if you
would like to punch his head for being such a fool, when all the time he
was not a fool at all, but a thoroughly good-hearted, brave, and clever
fellow--true as steel--steel of the very elastic watch-spring kind, for
the way in which he bent was terrible to see.

So Jack Penny went about smiling and slapping people's backs till it was
time to go, and we all watched the cessation of the flood with
eagerness.

The doctor, in talking, said that it was evident that this gorge ran
right up into quite a mountainous region acting as a drain to perhaps a
score of valleys which had been flooded by the sudden storm, and that
this adventure had given us as true an idea of the nature of the
interior we were about to visit as if we had studied a map.

Down went the water more and more swiftly till, as I was saying to the
doctor how grand it must have been to see the flood rolling over the
great fall, we saw that the rocky ledge along which we had come and that
on the other side of our little haven of safety were bare and drying up,
being washed perfectly clean and not showing so much as a trace of mud.

"Let us get on at once," the doctor said; "this is no road for a
traveller to choose, for the first storm will again make it a
d