I was to command came
back unhelmeted from the cock-fight, their birds under their arms, and
asked me who I was? No, I was not happy; but I made my new Cohort unhappy
too.... I wrote my Mother I was happy, but, oh, my friends'--he stretched
arms over bare knees--'I would not wish my worst enemy to suffer as I
suffered through my first months on the Wall. Remember this: among the
officers was scarcely one, except myself (and I thought I had lost the
favour of Maximus, my General), scarcely one who had not done something of
wrong or folly. Either he had killed a man, or taken money, or insulted
the magistrates, or blasphemed the Gods, and so had been 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