irs, full of the artless appeal
of love and passion, shameless because as yet unrecognized, and then
he turned away with disdain.

"I came here to learn Latin and higher algebra, not to fool with a
pack of girls," he told the school-master, bluntly. The young man
laughed and colored. He was honest and good; passion played over him
like wildfire, not with any heat for injury, but with a dazzle to
blind and charm.

He did not intend to marry until he had well established himself in
life, and would not; but in the meantime he gave his resolution as
loose a rein as possible, and conjugated _amo_ with shades of meaning
with every girl in the class.

"I don't see what I can do, Edwards," he said. "I cannot turn the
girls out, and I could not refuse them an equal privilege with you,
when they asked it."

Jerome gave the school-master a look of such entire comprehension and
consequent scorn that he fairly cast down his eyes before him; then
he went out with his books under his arm.

He paid for his few lessons with the first money he could save, in
spite of the school-master's remonstrances.

After that Jerome went on doggedly with his studies by himself, and
asked assistance from nobody. In the silent night, after his mother
and sister were in bed, he wrestled all alone with the angel of
knowledge, and half the time knew not whether he was smitten hip and
thigh or was himself the victor. Many a problem in his higher algebra
Jerome was never sure of having solved rightly; renderings of many
lines in his battered old Virgil, bought for a sixpence of a past
collegian in Dale, might, and might not, have been correct.

However, if he got nothing else from his studies, he got the
discipline of mental toil, and did not spend his whole strength in
the labor of his hands.

Jerome pegged and closed shoes with an open book on the bench beside
him; he measured his steps with conjugations of Latin verbs when he
walked to Dale with his finished work over shoulder; he studied every
spare moment, when his daily task was done, and kept this up, from a
youthful and unreasoning thirst for knowledge and defiance of
obstacles, until he was twenty-one. Then one day he packed away all
his old school-books, and never studied them again regularly; for
something happened which gave his energy the force of reason, and set
him firmly in a new track with a definite end in view.

Chapter XVI

One evening, not long after his twenty-fir