“Here’s a guinea for him!  He shall never say I robbed him of his uncle.”  And so, having turned the laugh in his favour by his merry way of taking it, he cracked his whip, and away they flew to make London under the five hours; while Jack Harrison, with his half-fullered shoe in his hand, went whistling back to the forge.

CHAPTER II—­THE WALKER OF CLIFFE ROYAL

So much for Champion Harrison!  Now, I wish to say something more about Boy Jim, not only because he was the comrade of my youth, but because you will find as you go on that this book is his story rather than mine, and that there came a time when his name and his fame were in the mouths of all England.  You will bear with me, therefore, while I tell you of his character as it was in those days, and especially of one very singular adventure which neither of us are likely to forget.

It was strange to see Jim with his uncle and his aunt, for he seemed to be of another race and breed to them.  Often I have watched them come up the aisle upon a Sunday, first the square, thick-set man, and then the little, worn, anxious-eyed woman, and last this glorious lad with his clear-cut face, his black curls, and his step so springy and light that it seemed as if he were bound to earth by some lesser tie than the heavy-footed villagers round him.  He had not yet attained his full six foot of stature, but no judge of a man (and every woman, at least, is one) could look at his perfect shoulders, his narrow loins, and his proud head that sat upon his neck like an eagle upon its perch, without feeling that sober joy which all that is beautiful in Nature gives to us—­a vague self-content, as though in some way we also had a hand in the making of it.

But we are used to associate beauty with softness in a man.  I do not know why they should be so coupled, and they never were with Jim.  Of all men that I have known, he was the most iron-hard in body and in mind.  Who was there among us who could walk with him, or run with him, or swim with him?  Who on all the country side, save only Boy Jim, would have swung himself over Wolstonbury Cliff, and clambered down a hundred feet with the mother hawk flapping at his ears in the vain struggle to hold him from her nest?  He was but sixteen, with his gristle not yet all set into bone, when he fought and beat Gipsy Lee, of Burgess Hill, who called himself the “Cock of the South Downs.”  It was after this that Champion Harrison took his training as a boxer in hand.

“I’d rather you left millin’ alone, Boy Jim,” said he, “and so had the missus; but if mill you must, it will not be my fault if you cannot hold up your hands to anything in the south country.”

And it was not long before he made good his promise.