"We had jolly good times----" "We've had better since," said Jack. "If you hadn't come to live here we might have been savages all our lives." "You must do me all the credit you can. At one time I had hoped to become a soldier myself." "Jolly good thing for us you didn't," said Jim. "But haven't you been sorry for it ever since, Mr. Eager?" "There are higher things even than soldiering," smiled Eager. "If I can help to make two good soldiers instead of one, then England is the gainer." "We'll jolly well do our best," said Jim. And so they had arrived at a portion of the problem of their house, and bore it lightly. And as to the grim remainder--"It would only uselessly darken both their lives," said Eager to himself. "We must leave it to time, and that is only another name for God's providence." CHAPTER XXVI JIM'S TIGHT PLACE Jack had set his heart on Woolwich. In due course he took the entrance examinations without difficulty, and passed into the Royal Military School with flying colours. Woolwich, however, was quite beyond Jim, and, besides, his heart was set on horses. He would be a cavalryman or nothing. But even for Sandhurst there was an examination to pass--an examination of a kind, but quite enough to give him the tremors, and sink his heart into his boots whenever he thought of it. Examinations always had been abomination to Jim and always got the better of him. He argued eloquently that pluck, and a firm seat, and a long reach would make a better cavalryman than all the decimal fractions and French and Latin that could be rammed into him. But the authorities had their own ideas on the subject. So to an army-tutor he went in due course, a notable crammer in the Midlands, who knew every likely twist and turn of the ordinary run of examiners, and had got more incapables into the service than any man of his time, and charged accordingly. And there, for six solid months, Jim was fed up like a prize turkey, on the absolutely necessary minimum of knowledge required for a pass, and grew mentally dyspeptic with the indigestible chunks of learning which he got off by heart, till his brain reeled and went on rolling them ponderously over and over even in his sleep. Fortunately he started with a good constitution, and there was hunting three days a week, or such a surfeit of knowledge might have proved too much for him. There were half a dozen more in the same condition; and the sight of those seven gallant hard-riders, poring with woebegone faces and tangled brains over tasks which in these days any fifth-form secondary-schoolboy would laugh at, tickled the soul of their tutor, Mr. Dodsley, almost out of its usual expression of benign and earnest sympathy at times. They represented, however, a very handsome living with comparatively easy work, and he did his whole duty by them according to his lights.