e with Jimmy and me to Wastdale and let me teach your
infant footsteps how to mountaineer. There's nothing like a stiff
climb and a summit for purging a man's mind. . . . I've come to like
mountains ever so much better than big game. They are the authentic
gods, high and clean; they're above desecration; the more you assail
them the more you are theirs. . . . Now there's always a kind of
lust, a kind of taint, about big-game hunting. No harm to a man if
he's in full health--but beastliness, and menagerie smell, if he's
not."

"Mountains!" scoffs he.

"You needn't despise them," said I. "They're apt to be heavenly,
just before Easter, with the snow on 'em; and Mickledore or Gable or
the Pillar from Ennerdale will easily afford you forty-four ways of
breaking your neck. . . . If you're good and can do a little trick I
have in mind on Scawfell I'll reward you by bringing you home past a
farm where they keep a couple of savage sheep-dogs. For a good
conduct prize, I have a friend up there--a farming clergyman--who
will teach you words of cheer by introducing you to a bull that can't
pass the Board of Trade test because he's like Lady Macbeth's hand--
however you babble to him in a green field he makes the green one
red. But these shall be special treats, you understand, held in
reserve. Most days you'll just climb till you're tired, and your
dinner shall be mutton for three weeks on end. . . . Now, don't
interrupt. I may seem to be on the oratorical lay to-night, but God
knows I'm in earnest. If I wasn't, I shouldn't have spoken out like
this before Jimmy, who's your friend and will back me up."

"I might," said Jimmy judiciously, "if I understood what you meant by
all this chat about savage animals. What is it, at all? Does the
Professor keep a menagerie? And, if so, why haven't I been invited?"

"Why, don't you know?" I asked.

"Know what?" asked Jimmy, leaning back and sucking at his pipe.
"Whatever it is, I probably don't: that's what a Public School and
University education did for me. As I seem to remember one Farrell's
remarking in the dim and distant past, for my part I never indulged
in Physiological Research--I made my own way in the world . . ."
He murmured it dreamily, and then sat up with a start. "Lord's
sake!" he cried out. "You don't tell me that Farrell . . . that the
Professor actually--"

"Don't be a fool," I interrupted. "Of course, Jack doesn't. Jack,
tell him about the Grand Re