After that I got frequent letters, and I wrote to him every week and sent him every kind of parcel I could think of.  His letters used to make me both ashamed and happy.  I had always banked on old Peter, and here he was behaving like an early Christian martyr—­never a word of complaint, and just as cheery as if it were a winter morning on the high veld and we were off to ride down springbok.  I knew what the loss of a leg must mean to him, for bodily fitness had always been his pride.  The rest of life must have unrolled itself before him very drab and dusty to the grave.  But he wrote as if he were on the top of his form and kept commiserating me on the discomforts of my job.  The picture of that patient, gentle old fellow, hobbling about his compound and puzzling over his Pilgrim’s Progress, a cripple for life after five months of blazing glory, would have stiffened the back of a jellyfish.

This last letter was horribly touching, for summer had come and the smell of the woods behind his prison reminded Peter of a place in the Woodbush, and one could read in every sentence the ache of exile.  I sat on that stone wall and considered how trifling were the crumpled leaves in my bed of life compared with the thorns Peter and Blaikie had to lie on.  I thought of Sandy far off in Mesopotamia, and old Blenkiron groaning with dyspepsia somewhere in America, and I considered that they were the kind of fellows who did their jobs without complaining.  The result was that when I got up to go on I had recovered a manlier temper.  I wasn’t going to shame my friends or pick and choose my duty.  I would trust myself to Providence, for, as Blenkiron used to say, Providence was all right if you gave him a chance.

It was not only Peter’s letter that steadied and calmed me.  Isham stood high up in a fold of the hills away from the main valley, and the road I was taking brought me over the ridge and back to the stream-side.  I climbed through great beechwoods, which seemed in the twilight like some green place far below the sea, and then over a short stretch of hill pasture to the rim of the vale.  All about me were little fields enclosed with walls of grey stone and full of dim sheep.  Below were dusky woods around what I took to be Fosse Manor, for the great Roman Fosse Way, straight as an arrow, passed over the hills to the south and skirted its grounds.  I could see the stream slipping among its water-meadows and could hear the plash of the weir.  A tiny village settled in a crook of the hill, and its church-tower sounded seven with a curiously sweet chime.  Otherwise there was no noise but the twitter of small birds and the night wind in the tops of the beeches.