'Happy?' said Parnesius. 'When the men of the Cohort 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 the Numidians. In virtue he was far my superior.' 'Then why was he on the Wall?' Una asked, quickly. 'They'd all done something bad. You said so yourself.'