Jerry's understanding of these things would come, but not until I had prepared him for them.

   This memoir is not so much the history of a boy or of a man as of an experiment. Therefore I will not longer delay in bringing Jerry to the point where my philosophy and John Benham's was to be put to the test. I have tried to indicate in as few phrases as possible Jerry Benham's essential characteristics, the moral attributes that were his and the shapeliness and strength of his body. I have never set great value on mere physical beauty, which too often reacts unpleasantly upon the character of its owner. But looks meant nothing to Jerry and he was as unconscious of his striking beauty as the scarlet poppy that nods in the meadow.

   At the age of twenty, to which point this narrative has arrived, Jerry Benham was six feet two inches in height and weighed, stripped, one hundred and eighty-two pounds. His hair was brown, his eyes gray and his features those of the Hermes of Praxiteles. His skin, naturally fair, was tanned by exposure to a ruddy brown, and his body, except for the few white scars upon his shoulder, relics of his encounter with the lynx, was without blemish. He was always in training, and his muscles were long and closely knit. I can hardly believe that there was a man on the Olympian fields of ancient Greece who could have been prettier to see than Jerry when he sparred with Flynn. He was as agile as a cat, never off his balance or his guard, and slipped in and out, circling and striking with a speed that was surprising in one of his height and weight. "Foot-work," Flynn called it, and there were times, I think, when the hard-breathing Irishman was glad enough at the call of "time."

   Flynn's own reply when I reproved him for the nonsense he had put into Jerry's head about the prize ring will show how Jerry stood in the eyes of one of the best athletes of his day. "He's a wonder, Misther Canby. Sure, ye can't blame me f'r wantin' to thry him against good 'uns. He ain't awake yet, sor, an' he's too good-nachured. Holy pow'rs! If the b'ye ever cud be injuced to get mad-like, he'd lick his weight in woild-cats—so he w'ud."

   There were times, as you may imagine, when I felt much like Frankenstein in awe of the creature I had created. But Jerry fortunately couldn't be "injuced to get mad-like." If things didn't happen to please him, he frowned and set his jaws until his mood had passed and he could speak his mind in calmness. His temper, like his will, was under perfect control. And yet I knew that the orderly habit of his mind was the result of growth 

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