aineer's love of the mountains, while
his trained eye noted with keen pleasure new details of line and
colour. Then, when the railroad trip was over and he neared the end of
the forty-mile wagon ride, bringing the little tower surmounting "The
Hall" of his alma mater in sight once more, his face lit up with
tender joy, for the old place had meant more to him than schools do to
the average boy. Sweeping his eye back over a landscape where purple
heights were tipped with sunset gold in the distance, giant beeches
held aloft their summer leafage in the valleys and mountain
flower-favourites bloomed in glorious June profusion everywhere, he
inwardly exclaimed, with sudden reverence:

"That is God's part, the fashioning of this beautiful setting," and
then turning again to the group of school buildings, "and this is
man's,--the bringing of humanity into harmony with the perfection of
His handiwork."

He had been unable to throw off entirely the depression which had
followed the rupture with Mr. Polk, and deeply stirred emotionally as
he had been in parting with Mrs. Polk, it required this spiritual
interpretation of school life to restore his equilibrium.

But the battle involved in the step he had taken was by no means
fought in that one flash of high conception. Being a wholesome,
normal fellow with an ordinary amount of selfish desire for comfort
(though he had seemed to follow a Quixotic idea into the wilderness),
he found himself at once missing the luxuries of life to which he
had become accustomed. All through the summer he travelled about on
horseback,--sometimes on foot,--stopping often at little squalid
cabins, and often also at meagre homes where housewives wrung his
heart with their pathetic effort to be thrifty and cleanly on almost
nothing, and everywhere he tried to inoculate the people with the idea
of education. On the whole his experience proved more of a hardship
than he had believed possible with his early mountain bringing up.
He discovered that he had a decided liking for individual towels, and
was quite capable of annoyance when obliged to bathe his face in a
family tin wash-pan,--or temporarily idle skillet where wash-pans
were unknown,--while his predilection for a bath tub with hot and cold
water on tap had become more fixed than he had suspected.

"Have I already grown too fastidious to be helpful to my own people?"
he asked himself in disgust. Then he squared his shoulders and set his
lips in