So he marched out with his lamp and left me in the store with all the shadows and things, and the sound of the North Fork rapids under the bridge. One lamp made awful little light in that store. D’y’u think I laughed at Edmund then, like I so often did? Not a bit. I sat down on the counter and thought him over. And for the first time I expect I saw him clear. Saw him alone in that valley, unlike anybody or anythin’ that was there, or likely to come there. And him with his college mates and all men and women who set store by him miles and miles and miles away in the East. It made me feel old and lonesome myself! And then--throwin’ those chocolates into the river! Maybe he was the oldest man in the valley, for Jake and Baldy had crossed the line into childhood. But I laughed at him next mornin’. The Siwash had started down the valley with the mail and no one had come to the store yet that early--it was dark. So Edmund had nothin’ to do, and he was weighin’ himself on the scales. “I don’t gain,” says he, disgusted. “Not a pound in a year.” “Y’u don’t think the thoughts that make a man fat,” says I. “A hundred and forty,” says he, and jumps down. Well, I did weigh a hundred and sixty, stripped, right along--and we was pretty near of a height. Maybe I had half an inch the better of him. “But,” I tells him for consolation, “it’s your great age. You’ll be twenty-five next July and I was only twenty-four last June.” It was November we was in, y’u know. So I laughs. “Yes!” he says. “You twenty-four! You stopped maturing at six.” And he laughs, too.