Not much had figured to us, perhaps, during these five years except the shapes of romance with which strong young souls can always people a desert. We had put on mind and muscle. We could run, swim, fight, eat anything that was set before us, and want more. Our excursions were further afield; our walks more extended along the road to Parnassus. We were very fine fellows, no doubt, in our own opinions; and our voices were beginning to growl handsomely. Harry had, for his part, developed into a shapely, fearless young figure, with a good manner of speech and a great attachment to my uncle. He had, moreover, developed a decided bent towards mechanics, and went now on two days in the week to a technical school in Yokestone, making the journey to and from on foot, and sleeping each night with a cousin of his mother’s, who owned a small foundry there, and who, since the boy’s proof of himself, had taken a practical interest in his welfare. The periodic partings were without savour to us, had it not been that to them the periodic reunions supplied the salt. But no doubt they were helpful in giving us opportunity for a more individually independent growth; and certainly during them “Coke upon Littleton” (for Mr. Sant was training me with an eye to the Law) secured my less divided attention. As to Dunberry itself and its familiar figures, there was little change to be noted. On the one side there was the ripening of the young fruit towards maturity; on the other, a little whiter growth of lichen on the decaying branches. Uncle Jenico must count among the latter; though surely no tree past fruiting ever retained more unimpaired the sweetness of its sap. He had collected during this period enough antiquities to furnish out an old rag, bone, and iron shop; and, indeed, I am afraid the bulk of his stock was not suited to a much more exclusive repository. There was little which, provided it was gathered from the beach and had once been a part of something living or manufactured, he would not give a place in it. His veneration for rust was the most artless thing. An object had only to be corroded with it, to figure in his eyes for an assured antique. In this way he amassed great quantities of bolts, links, sheet-iron fragments, and other rarities, to most of which he assigned a use and period, which, I am convinced, had never been theirs. There was, for instance, a breastplate of the Renaissance era, which I do believe had never been anything but a dish-cover of our own. There was an iron skull-cap, or morion, of Edward the First’s time, which I will swear was nothing but a saucepan without its handle; the handle itself, indeed, being found near the same spot a few days later, and catalogued for the head of a boar spear. Part of a whale’s under jaw, much decayed, figured for the prow of a Viking ship; and divers teeth, mostly, I think, horses’, for the grinders of prehistoric monsters. There were some bronze coins certainly--none too many--whose value was