“You half told me not to say who I was.”

“Yes, but I was delighted when you disobeyed me.”

“I did it very badly.  I never rise to great occasions, I always fall to them, but these things must come as they come.”

“You did it as well as it could be done, and good will come of it.”

“And now,” he continued, “describe exactly all that passed between you and the Professors.  On which side of Panky did Hanky sit, and did they sit north and south or east and west?  How did you get—­oh yes, I know that—­you told them it would be of no further use to them.  Tell me all else you can.”

My father said that the Professors were sitting pretty well east and west, so that Hanky, who was on the east side, nearest the mountains, had Panky, who was on the Sunch’ston side, on his right hand.  George made a note of this.  My father then told what the reader already knows, but when he came to the measurement of the boots, George said, “Take your boots off,” and began taking off his own.  “Foot for foot,” said he, “we are not father and son, but brothers.  Yours will fit me; they are less worn than mine, but I daresay you will not mind that.”

On this George ex abundanti cautela knocked a nail out of the right boot that he had been wearing and changed boots with my father; but he thought it more plausible not to knock out exactly the same nail that was missing on my father’s boot.  When the change was made, each found—­or said he found—­the other’s boots quite comfortable.

My father all the time felt as though he were a basket given to a dog.  The dog had got him, was proud of him, and no one must try to take him away.  The promptitude with which George took to him, the obvious pleasure he had in “running” him, his quick judgement, verging as it should towards rashness, his confidence that my father trusted him without reserve, the conviction of perfect openness that was conveyed by the way in which his eyes never budged from my father’s when he spoke to him, his genial, kindly, manner, perfect physical health, and the air he had of being on the best possible terms with himself and every one else—­the combination of all this so overmastered my poor father (who indeed had been sufficiently mastered before he had been five minutes in George’s company) that he resigned himself as gratefully to being a basket, as George had cheerfully undertaken the task of carrying him.

In passing I may say that George could never get his own boots back again, though he tried more than once to do so.  My father always made some excuse.  They were the only memento of George that he brought home with him; I wonder that he did not ask for a lock of his hair, but he did not.  He had the boots put against a wall in his bedroom, where he could see them from his bed, and during his illness, while consciousness yet remained with him, I saw his eyes continually turn towards them.  George, in fact,