the rounded surface of the wall at the side of the doorstep.
"Seen Uncle Tom's Cabin?" Mark asked.
Paul had no idea what Uncle Tom's Cabin was, and Mark explained that he had walked nine miles to see it performed in Dominion Hall at Bridgetown. He had paid ten cents for a seat. A man had given him the dime for carrying a bag.
Paul's Sunday-school teacher had impressed upon him the evil of theatres, her clinching argument being that a former President of the United States had been shot in one! He maintained a patronizing silence.
"I could show you what it's like, with little Eva and Legree and the bloodhounds," Mark offered, "if I had a pencil and some paper."
Paul glanced doubtfully at Mark's muddy boots, but in the end invited him to go round to the back porch, where he would meet him with pencils and paper and wax crayons, and they suddenly dashed off.
On the back porch Mark showed Paul what little Eva "was like." He also showed him what Julius Cæsar was like, and Boadicea and Napoleon and the boy on the burning deck. He gave them all Roman noses and crimson-lake lips, and portrayed them "eyes-right," with turrets and ramparts in the background. But they were very real to Paul by dint of their creator's intense, life-endowing belief in them, just as Paul's music had been very real to Mark Laval for a similar reason. On the strength of that common interest Paul suddenly realized that Mark was his friend. Simultaneously he was penetrated with a sense of the French boy's forlornness.
Mark had a father who came down from the lumber camps for whisky and vowed to kick all the nonsense out of his son. He was at school only because the authorities insisted on it. As soon as the law allowed, Mark's father planned to take him into the woods. With this destiny
