enny did not speak for a few minutes, and I sat thinking bitterly
of my weakness as I stroked Gyp's head, the faithful beast having curled
up between us and laid his head upon my lap. I seemed to have been so
cowardly, and, weary and dejected as I was, I wished that I had grown to
be a man, with a man's strength and indifference to danger.

"Oh, I don't know," said Jack Penny suddenly.

"Don't know what?" I said sharply, as he startled me out of my thinking
fit.

"Oh! about being girlish and--and--and, well, cowardly, I suppose you
mean."

"Yes, cowardly," I said bitterly. "I thought I should be so brave, and
that when I had found where my father was I should fight and bring him
away from among the savages."

"Ah! yes," said Jack Penny dryly, "that's your sort! That's like what
you read in books and papers about boys of fifteen, and sixteen, and
seventeen. They're wonderful chaps, who take young women in their arms
and then jump on horseback with 'em and gallop off at full speed. Some
of 'em have steel coats like lobsters on, and heavy helmets, and that
makes it all the easier. I've read about some of them chaps who wielded
their swords--they never swing 'em about and chop and stab with 'em, but
wield 'em, and they kill three or four men every day and think nothing
of it. I used to swallow all that stuff, but I'm not such a guffin
now."

There was a pause here, while Jack Penny seemed to be thinking.

"Why, some of these chaps swim across rivers with a man under their arm,
and if they're on horseback they sing out a battle-cry and charge into a
whole army, and everybody's afraid of 'em. I say, ain't it jolly
nonsense Joe Carstairs?"

"I suppose it is," I said sadly, for I had believed in some of these
heroes too.

"I don't believe the boy ever lived who didn't feel in an awful stew
when he was in danger. Why, men do at first before they get used to it.
There was a chap came to our place last year and did some shepherding
for father for about six months. He'd been a soldier out in the Crimean
war and got wounded twice in the arm and in the leg, big wounds too. He
told me that when they got the order to advance, him and his mates, they
were all of a tremble, and the officers looked as pale as could be, some
of 'em; but every man tramped forward steady enough, and it wasn't till
they began to see their mates drop that the want to fight began to come.
They felt savage, he says, then, and as soon as th