“And have I got it?” asked Lewis, smiling.

“You meet life with a calmness and deftness unusual in a boy,” said Leighton, gravely.

“I—­I don’t know,” began Lewis.  “I’ve never been educated.  By the time I was nine I knew how to read and write and figure a little.  After that—­you know—­I just sat on the hills for years with the goats.  I read the Reverend Orme’s books, of course.”

“What were the books?”

“There weren’t many,” said Lewis.  “There was the Bible, of course.  There was a little set of Shakspere in awfully fine print and a set of Walter Scott.”

Leighton nodded.  “The Bible is essential but not educative until you learn to depolarize it.  Shakspere—­you’ll begin to read Shakspere in about ten years.  Walter Scott.  Scott—­well—­Scott is just a bright ax for the neck of time.  What else did you read?”

“I read ‘The City of God’ but not very often.”

For a second Leighton stared; then he burst into laughter.  He checked himself suddenly.

“Boy,” he said, “don’t misunderstand.  I’m not laughing at the book; I’m laughing at your reading St. Augustine even ‘not very often!’”

“Why shouldn’t you laugh?” asked Lewis, simply.  “I laughed sometimes.  I remember I always laughed at the heading to the twenty-first book.”

“Did you?” said Leighton, a look of wonder in his face.  “What is it?  I don’t quite recollect the headings that far.”

“’Of the eternal punishment of the wicked in hell, and of the various objections urged against it,’” quoted Lewis, smiling.

Leighton grinned his appreciation.

“There is a flavor about unconscious humor,” he said, “that’s like the bouquet to a fine wine:  only the initiated catch it.  I’m afraid you were an educated person even before you read St. Augustine.  Did he put up a good case for torment?  You see, you’ve found me out.  I’ve never read him.”

“His case was weak in spots,” said Lewis.  “His examples from nature, for instance, proving that bodies may remain unconsumed and alive in fire.”

“Yes?” said Leighton.

“He starts out, ’if, therefore the salamander lives in fire, as naturalists have recorded——­’ I looked up salamander in the dictionary.”

Lewis’s eyes were laughing, but Leighton’s grew suddenly grave.  “Poor old chap!” he said.  “He didn’t know that time rots the sanest argument.  ‘Oh... that mine adversary had written a book,’ cried one who knew.”

Leighton sat thoughtful for a moment, then he threw up his head.

“Well,” he said, “we’ll give up trying to find out how you got educated.  Let’s change the subject.  Has it occurred to you that at any moment you may be called upon to support yourself?”

“It did once,” said Lewis, “when I started for Oeiras.  Then I met you.  You haven’t given me time or—­or cause to think about it since.  I’m—­I’m not ungrateful——­”