es was almost enough to reveal
that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had
been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor
literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he
was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that
of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls'
schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go
into training, since she would not marry him offhand.

About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester,
and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the
schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston.
All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails
driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter
nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of
which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative
labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his
abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a
comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself,
had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were
seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on
the civilization of that time.

A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby
of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into
fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting
himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had
collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for
their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with
him. But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all.
Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite
late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining
from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite
miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person
given over to study, he was not exactly studying.

The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the
schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the
flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of
undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no
advantages beyond those of his own making. And yet the tale, true
enough till latterly, was not