Marygreen
village every Saturday evening. And thus he reached and passed his
nineteenth year.

VI

At this memorable date of his life he was, one Saturday, returning
from Alfredston to Marygreen about three o'clock in the afternoon.
It was fine, warm, and soft summer weather, and he walked with his
tools at his back, his little chisels clinking faintly against the
larger ones in his basket. It being the end of the week he had left
work early, and had come out of the town by a round-about route which
he did not usually frequent, having promised to call at a flour-mill
near Cresscombe to execute a commission for his aunt.

He was in an enthusiastic mood. He seemed to see his way to living
comfortably in Christminster in the course of a year or two, and
knocking at the doors of one of those strongholds of learning of
which he had dreamed so much. He might, of course, have gone there
now, in some capacity or other, but he preferred to enter the city
with a little more assurance as to means than he could be said to
feel at present. A warm self-content suffused him when he considered
what he had already done. Now and then as he went along he turned
to face the peeps of country on either side of him. But he hardly
saw them; the act was an automatic repetition of what he had been
accustomed to do when less occupied; and the one matter which really
engaged him was the mental estimate of his progress thus far.

"I have acquired quite an average student's power to read the
common ancient classics, Latin in particular." This was true,
Jude possessing a facility in that language which enabled him with
great ease to himself to beguile his lonely walks by imaginary
conversations therein.

"I have read two books of the _Iliad_, besides being pretty familiar
with passages such as the speech of Phoenix in the ninth book,
the fight of Hector and Ajax in the fourteenth, the appearance of
Achilles unarmed and his heavenly armour in the eighteenth, and the
funeral games in the twenty-third. I have also done some Hesiod, a
little scrap of Thucydides, and a lot of the Greek Testament... I
wish there was only one dialect all the same.

"I have done some mathematics, including the first six and the
eleventh and twelfth books of Euclid; and algebra as far as simple
equations.

"I know something of the Fathers, and something of Roman and English
history.

"These things are only a beginning. But I shall not make much
f