gan refused any information about
it, and merely said it was part of his system. Dal said that if HE had
anything like that in his system he certainly would be glad to get rid
of it.

At a quarter to six Jim appeared, still sullen from the events of the
afternoon and wearing a dressing gown and a pair of slippers, Flannigan
following him with a sponge, a bucket of water and an armful of bath
towels. Everybody protested at having to move, but he was firm, and they
all filed down the stairs. I was the last, with Aunt Selina just ahead
of me. At the top of the stairs, she turned around suddenly to me.

"That policeman looks cruel," she said. "What's more, he's been in a
bad humor all day. More than likely he'll put James flat on the roof
and tramp on him, under pretense of training him. All policemen are
inhuman."

"He only rolls him over a barrel or something like that," I protested.

"James had a bump like an egg over his ear last night," Aunt Selina
insisted, glaring at Flannigan's unconscious back. "I don't think it's
safe to leave him. It is my time to relax for thirty minutes, or I
would watch him. You will have to stay," she said, fixing me with her
imperious eyes.

So I stayed. Jim didn't want me, and Flannigan muttered mutiny. But
it was easier to obey Aunt Selina than to clash with her, and anyhow I
wanted to see the barrel in use.

I never saw any one train before. It is not a joyful spectacle. First,
Flannigan made Jim run, around and around the roof. He said it stirred
up his food and brought it in contact with his liver, to be digested.

Flannigan, from meekness and submission, of a sort, in the kitchen,
became an autocrat on the roof.

"Once more," he would say. "Pick up your feet, sir! Pick up your feet!"

And Jim would stagger doggedly past me, where I sat on the parapet, his
poor cheeks shaking and the tail of his bath robe wrapping itself around
his legs. Yes, he ran in the bath robe in deference to me. It seems
there isn't much to a running suit.

"Head up," Flannigan would say. "Lift your knees, sir. Didn't you ever
see a horse with string halt?"

He let him stop finally, and gave him a moment to get his breath. Then
he set him to turning somersaults. They spread the cushions from the
couch in the tent on the roof, and Jim would poke his head down and say
a prayer, and then curve over as gracefully as a sausage and come up
gasping, as if he had been pushed off a boat.

"Five pounds a day