‘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.’

’He was the nephew, his Father had died, of a great rich man in Gaul who was not always kind to his Mother.  When Pertinax grew up, he discovered this, and so his uncle shipped him off, by trickery and force, to the Wall.  We came to know each other at a ceremony in our Temple—­in the dark.  It was the Bull-Killing,’ Parnesius explained to Puck.

’I see, said Puck, and turned to the children.  ’That’s something you wouldn’t quite understand.  Parnesius means he met Pertinax in church.’

’Yes—­in the Cave we first met, and we were both raised to the Degree of Gryphons together.’  Parnesius lifted his hand towards his neck for an instant.  ’He had been on the Wall two years, and knew the Picts well.  He taught me first how to take Heather.’

‘What’s that?’ said Dan.

’Going out hunting in the Pict country with a tame Pict.  You are quite safe so long as you are his guest, and wear a sprig of heather where it can be seen.  If you went alone you would surely be killed, if you were not smothered first in the bogs.  Only the Picts know their way about those black and hidden bogs.  Old Allo, the one-eyed, withered little Pict from whom we bought our ponies, was our special friend.  At first we went only to escape from the terrible town, and to talk together about our homes.  Then he showed us how to hunt wolves and those great red deer with horns like Jewish