Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 7, 2025
When the whistle blew five Jim made an heroic effort and turned and looked at the derrick, again spliced into place. He shuddered but forced himself to look. It was after sunset when Jim finally turned away. It was many years before he came to this place again. Yet Exham had made its indelible imprint on the boy. The convictions that had molded his first fourteen years were to mold his whole life.
The oldest men in Exham told that their grandfathers, as boys, had sought the swimming hole as the adult seeks his club. Jim looked with interest at his legs. "I've got six. How many have you, Pilly?" Phil counted the brown bloodsuckers that clung to his fat calves. "Seven. Mean cusses, ain't they." Jim worked with a sharp edged stone, scraping his thin shanks. "You've got fat to spare.
And that while he longed vaguely for the old brownstone front, he felt with a sudden invigorating thrill that he belonged where he was and that he was nearer to Exham than he had been since he had left there. It was nearing evening of the fourth day after Charlie's disappearance that Jim suddenly saw the canyon walls widen. He struggled at last up onto a sandy beach and looked about him.
The very peak of his anger was reached when it suddenly came home to Jim that he had failed his father, had proved renegade to old Exham. Three months! A cool dismissal after over eight years of his heart's blood had been given to the Service! Jim groaned, then sat erect. "Serves you right, you dreaming fool! Nobody to blame but yourself! Three months!
Old visions were passing before his eyes. Once more he saw the degraded mansions on the elm-shaded streets. Old Exham, with its lost ideals. Ideals of what? Was Pen right?
Jim and Williams looked each other over carefully and liked each other at once. They found immediately in each other's society something very choice. The friendship had not been a week old before Iron Skull had heard of Exham and the brownstone front and of Penelope.
He felt that it was incumbent on him to do the things that his father had not been able to do. Vaguely and childishly he determined that he must make good for the Mannings and for Exham. Poor old Exham, with its lost ideals! It was in thinking this over that Jim conceived an idea that became a great comfort to him.
Was it the ideal of national responsibility that Exham had lost the ideal that had built the town meeting house and the public school, that had produced the giants of those early days, giants who had ruled the nation with an integrity long lost to these later times. "My father said to me, 'Somehow we Americans have fallen down on our jobs!" said Jim, pausing before Pen, finally.
This was a familiar form of hazing with the Exham boys. There was a horror in a first experience with the little brown pests that usually resulted in a mild form of hysteria very pleasing to the young spectators. But Charlie was in an agony of loathing, far ahead of anything the boys had seen. As Jim ran up, Charlie struck at him madly and the boys yelled in delight. Jim turned on them.
He often had wondered what he was going to be as a man. He had planned to be many things, from a milkman to an Indian fighter. But since his father's death and indeed for some time before, his mind had taken a bent suggested by Mr. Manning's melancholy. What was the matter with Exham and the Mannings? Why had his father failed? What could he do to make up for the failure?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking