In his capacity of schoolmaster he had sharpened his wits against those
of the lively city boys he had in charge, and made such a reputation as
"Master" Gridley, that he kept that title even after he had become a
college tutor and professor. As a tutor he had to deal with many of
these same boys, and others like them, in the still more vivacious period
of their early college life. He got rid of his police duties when he
became a professor, but he still studied the pupils as carefully as he
used once to watch them, and learned to read character with a skill which
might have fitted him for governing men instead of adolescents. But he
loved quiet and he dreaded mingling with the brawlers of the
market-place, whose stock in trade is a voice and a vocabulary. So it
was that he had passed his life in the patient mechanical labor of
instruction, leaving too many of his instincts and faculties in abeyance.

The alluvium of all this experience bore a nearer resemblance to worldly
wisdom than might have been conjectured; much nearer, indeed, than it
does in many old instructors, whose eyes get fish-like as their blood
grows cold, and who are not fit to be trusted with anything more
practical than a gerund or a cosine. Master Gridley not only knew a good
deal of human nature, but he knew how to keep his knowledge to himself
upon occasion. He understood singularly well the ways and tendencies of
young people. He was shrewd in the detection of trickery, and very
confident in those who had once passed the ordeal of his well-schooled
observing powers. He had no particular tendency to meddle with the
personal relations of those about him; but if they were forced upon him
in any way, he was like to see into them at least as quickly as any of
his neighbors who thought themselves most endowed with practical skill.

In leaving the duties of his office he considered himself, as he said a
little despondently, like an old horse unharnessed and turned out to
pasture. He felt that he had separated himself from human interests, and
was henceforth to live in his books with the dead, until he should be
numbered with them himself. He had chosen this quiet village as a place
where he might pass his days undisturbed, and find a peaceful
resting-place in its churchyard, where the gravel was dry, and the sun
lay warm, and the glowing woods of autumn would spread their many-colored
counterpane over the bed where he would be taking his rest.