een 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. Listen
to the Pious Parnesius on Friendship!'

'I am not pious,'Parnesius answered, 'but I know what goodness means;
and my friend, though he was without hope, was ten thousand times
better than I. Stop laughing, Faun!'

'Oh, Youth Eternal and All-believing,' cried Puck, as he rocked on the
branch above. 'Tell them about your Pertinax.'

'He was that friend the Gods sent me--the boy who spoke to me when I
first came. Little older than myself, commanding the Augusta Victoria
Cohort on the tower next to us and the Numidians. In virtue he was far
my superior.'

'Then why was he on the Wall?' Una asked, quickly. 'They'd all done
something bad. You said so yourself.'

'He was the nephew, his father had died, of a great rich man in Gaul
who was not always kind to his mother. When Pertinax grew up, he
discovered this, and so his uncle shipped him off, by trickery and
force, to the Wall. We came to know each other at a ceremony in our
Temple in the dark. It was the Bull-Killing,'Parnesius explained to
Puck.

'I see, said Puck, and turned to the children. 'That's something you
wouldn't quite understand. Parnesius means he met Pertinax i