At a quarter to six Jim appeared, still sullen from the events of the afternoon and wearing a dressing gown and a pair of slippers, Flannigan following him with a sponge, a bucket of water and an armful of bath towels.  Everybody protested at having to move, but he was firm, and they all filed down the stairs.  I was the last, with Aunt Selina just ahead of me.  At the top of the stairs, she turned around suddenly to me.

“That policeman looks cruel,” she said.  “What’s more, he’s been in a bad humor all day.  More than likely he’ll put James flat on the roof and tramp on him, under pretense of training him.  All policemen are inhuman.”

“He only rolls him over a barrel or something like that,” I protested.

“James had a bump like an egg over his ear last night,” Aunt Selina insisted, glaring at Flannigan’s unconscious back.  “I don’t think it’s safe to leave him.  It is my time to relax for thirty minutes, or I would watch him.  You will have to stay,” she said, fixing me with her imperious eyes.

So I stayed.  Jim didn’t want me, and Flannigan muttered mutiny.  But it was easier to obey Aunt Selina than to clash with her, and anyhow I wanted to see the barrel in use.

I never saw any one train before.  It is not a joyful spectacle.  First, Flannigan made Jim run, around and around the roof.  He said it stirred up his food and brought it in contact with his liver, to be digested.

Flannigan, from meekness and submission, of a sort, in the kitchen, became an autocrat on the roof.

“Once more,” he would say.  “Pick up your feet, sir!  Pick up your feet!”

And Jim would stagger doggedly past me, where I sat on the parapet, his poor cheeks shaking and the tail of his bath robe wrapping itself around his legs.  Yes, he ran in the bath robe in deference to me.  It seems there isn’t much to a running suit.

“Head up,” Flannigan would say.  “Lift your knees, sir.  Didn’t you ever see a horse with string halt?”

He let him stop finally, and gave him a moment to get his breath.  Then he set him to turning somersaults.  They spread the cushions from the couch in the tent on the roof, and Jim would poke his head down and say a prayer, and then curve over as gracefully as a sausage and come up gasping, as if he had been pushed off a boat.

“Five pounds a day; not less, sir,” Flannigan said encouragingly.  “You’ll drop it in chunks.”

Jim looked at the tin as if he expected to see the chunks lying at his feet.

“Yes,” he said, wiping the back of his neck.  “If we’re in here thirty days that will be one hundred and fifty pounds.  Don’t forget to stop in time, Flannigan.  I don’t want to melt away like a candle.”

He was cheered, however, by the promise of reduction.

“What do you think of that, Kit?” he called to me.  “Your uncle is going to look as angular as a problem in geometry.  I’ll—­I’ll be the original reductio ad absurdum.  Do you want me to stand on my head, Flannigan?  Wouldn’t that reduce something?”