one from the very beginning to the end of the high school course. Now
he's in college, and I don't know what he'll do after he graduates, but
I'm sure it will be something fine. Don't you think that's better than
being afraid of being laughed at, and settling down to be an ignorant
laborer all his life?"

"Oh, I guess it's all right, if he felt like it." Jerry spoke with an
elaborate carelessness. "Well, I must be going." There was a trace of
resentment in his tone, more than a trace in his heart. Jerry's high
opinion of Peggy had originally sprung from her appreciation of his good
qualities. It was a rather painful surprise to find that she recognized
his lacks. In fact, Jerry was inclined to think that she exaggerated
them.

"I ain't no coward, just because I don't want to be cooped up in school
with a lot of kids," he told himself angrily, as he walked away. Yet his
morning's talk with Peggy had clouded his spirits. Long before Jerry had
come to accept with cheerful philosophy the disapproval of his
neighbors. They understood crops and dairying. He understood birds and
trees, and, in his own opinion, he was at no disadvantage in the
comparison, but rather the opposite. He regarded their knowledge as
humdrum, and it did not disturb him that they looked on his acquisitions
as worthless.

But with Peggy it was different. The naturalist who had impoverished
himself in his eagerness to study birds, she had held up to his
admiration as a great man. Jerry was sure that his neighbors would not
so estimate him. They would call him "shiftless," the adjective that had
been applied times without number to Jerry himself. Peggy approved such
research, and yet she found fault with him. She thought he needed the
help of the schools, of books, of friends. Undoubtedly she had implied
that he was a coward. Jerry winced at the recollection.

"I don't have to go to school just to please her," Jerry boasted, but
his declaration of independence failed to assuage that curious
uneasiness that was almost pain. He had disappointed a friend. His
effort to forget that fact in manufacturing resentment against Peggy
proved quite unsuccessful.

As for Peggy, she watched the vanishing figure rather ruefully, and was
inclined to think her morning's effort wasted, if not worse. Like most
amateur gardeners, Peggy was fond of immediate results. She liked to see
shoots starting when the seed had hardly touched the soil, leaf and
blossom following w