any better than or much different from those of
the others. You know, and I know, that whichever is finally engaged, or
even if your silly deadlock is broken by employing a new candidate, the
school will be the same old story. It will still be the school it was when
I came into it a little ragged boy"--here Jim's voice grew a little
husky--"and when I left it, a bigger boy, but still as ragged as ever."

There was a slight sensation in the audience, as if, as Con Bonner said
about the knockdown, they hadn't thought Jim Irwin could do it.

"Well," said Con, "you've done well to hold your own."

"In all the years I attended this school," Jim went on, "I never did a bit
of work in school which was economically useful. It was all dry stuff
copied from the city schools. No other pupil ever did any real work of the
sort farmers' boys and girls should do. We copied city schools--and the
schools we copied are poor schools. We made bad copies of them, too. If
any of you three men were making a fight for what Roosevelt's Country Life
Commission called a 'new kind of rural school,' I'd say fight. But you
aren't. You're just making individual fights for your favorite teachers."

Jim Irwin made a somewhat lengthy speech after the awkwardness wore off,
so long that his audience was nodding and yawning by the time he reached
his peroration, in which he abjured Bronson, Bonner and Peterson to study
his plan of a new kind of rural school,--in which the work of the school
should be correlated with the life of the home and the farm--a school
which would be in the highest degree cultural by being consciously useful
and obviously practical. There sharp spats of applause from the useless
hands of Newton Bronson gave the final touch of absurdity to a situation
which Jim had felt to be ridiculous all through. Had it not been for
Jennie Woodruff's "Humph!" stinging him to do something outside the round
of duties into which he had fallen, had it not been for the absurd notion
that perhaps, after they had heard his speech, they would place him in
charge of the school, and that he might be able to do something really
important in it, he would not have been there. As he sat down, he felt
himself a silly clodhopper, filled with the east wind of his own conceit,
out of touch with the real world of men. He knew himself a dreamer. The
nodding board of directors, the secretary, actually snoring, and the bored
audience restored the field-hand to a sense