At this stage of my story it is scarcely requisite that I should, but the account is loose and vagrant and with no chronology.

Physically, he was more than most men, six feet in height, deep of chest, broad-shouldered, strong-legged and strong-featured, and ever in good health, so far as all goes, save the temporary tax on recklessness nature so often levies, and the other irregular tax she levies by some swoop of the bacilli of which the doctors talk so much and know so little.

I mean only that he might catch a fever with a chill addition if he lay carelessly in some miasmatic swamp on some hunting expedition, or that, in time of cholera, he might have, like other men, to struggle with the enemy.

But he tossed off most things lightly, and had that vitality which is of heredity, not built up with a single generation, though sometimes lost in one.

Forest and farm-bred, college-bred, city-fostered and broadened and hardened.