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 in church.'

'Yes--in the Cave we first met, and we were both raised to the Degree of
Gryphons together.' Parnesius lifted his hand towards his neck for an
instant. 'He had been on the Wall two years, and knew the Picts well. He
taught me first how to take Heather.'

'What's that?' said Dan.

'Going out hunting in the Pict country with a tame Pict. You are quite
safe so long as you are his guest, and wear a sprig of heather where it
can be seen. If you went alone you would surely be killed, if you were
not smothered first in the bogs. Only the Picts know their way about
those black and hidden bogs. Old Allo, the one-eyed, withered little
Pict from whom we bought our ponies, was our special friend. At first we
went only to escape from the terrible town, and to talk together about
our homes. Then he showed us how to hunt wolves and those great red deer
with horns like Jewish candlesticks. The Roman-born officers rather
looked down on us for doing this, but we preferred the heather to their
amusements. Believe me,' Parnesius turned again to Dan, 'a boy is safe
from all things that really harm when he is astride a pony or after a
deer. Do you remember, O Faun,'--he turned to Puck--'the little altar I
built to the Sylvan Pan by the pine-forest beyond the brook?'

'Which? The stone one