When Roger was seventeen and I but twelve he lost two years out of his school-life, and this brought us closer together ultimately, as will be seen. In some more than usually violent game of his favourite baseball at this time he managed to fall so heavily on his chest as slightly to bruise the lung, and a teasing cough that resulted from this terrified his mother, over whom, like so many of her pure-blooded countrywomen, the White Scourge hung threateningly, never very far away. Good luck sent them just then an invitation from a distant cousin, skipper of a large schooner that plied in Southern waters, and she thankfully sent Roger off for a long cruise with him. It was a fine experience, and oh, how bitterly I longed to share it, as the skipper cousin urged me to do! But I was the only son of my mother and she a widow, and so I swallowed my grief and contented myself with writing. It had long been a great grief to me that I must follow him so far behind at college--he had of course decided me on his own university--and one of my contentments at this period was the hope of winning ahead a year and leaving only two between us. This would enable me to enter Yale when he was but half way in his course, which as a matter of fact, I accomplished, to my mother's great pride. She liked Roger, but always found him a little heavy and slow, and secretly cherished my greater facility and more rapid mental development with a fond and wholly female short-sightedness. Our correspondence was very characteristic at this time: I have specimens of both sides of it. My letters are long and detailed, almost school-diaries. Roger's are few, short and immensely impressive. He had a straightforward, utterly unimaginative style that strikes the heart like Defoe's. He gave the strongest sense of great events always happening, of high seas, bright, strange coasts, racy, vital talk--and all in few, short words. "We have been rolling hard for three days now," he says in one letter, "and the ship's dog died of colic, which is about the worst sign there is, they say. It may be we shall be wrecked. I wish you were here, Jerry, you would enjoy it. They have stopped trying to coddle me now and I live rough, like the rest. The food is not so very good, but we all eat hard. I hardly ever cough at all now. The captain says I am as handy as the next man."