in. "What did his learning do for him?"

"It killed him," returned his stepmother shortly.

She stood before him wiping her gnarled hands on her soiled apron. His
gaze fell upon her, and he wondered angrily whence sprung her
indomitable energy--the energy that could expend itself upon potatoes.
Her face was sharpened until it seemed to become all feature--there were
hollows in the narrow temples, and where the pale, thin hair was drawn
tightly over the head he could trace the prominent bones of the skull.

As he looked at her his own petty suffering was overshadowed by the
visible tragedy of her life--the sordid tragedy where unconsciousness
was pathos. He reached out quickly and took a corner of her apron in his
hand. It was the strongest demonstration of affection he had ever made
to her.

"I'll sort them, ma," he said lightly. "There's not a speck in the lot
of them too fine for my eyes." And he knelt down beside the earthy heap.

But when he went up to his room an hour later and lighted his kerosene
lamp, it was not of his stepmother that he was thinking--nor was it of
Eugenia. His stiffened muscles contracted in physical pain, and his
brain was deadened by the sense of unutterable defeat. The delirium of
his anger had passed away; the fever of his skin had chilled beneath the
cold sweat that broke over him--in the reaction from the madness that
had gripped him he was conscious of a sanity almost sublime. The
habitual balance of his nature had swung back into place.

He got out his books and arranged them as usual beside the lamp. Then he
took up the volume he had been reading and held it unopened in his
hands. He stared straight before him at the whitewashed wall of the
little room, at the rough pine bedstead, at the crude washstand, at the
coloured calendar above.

On the unearthly whiteness of the wall he beheld the pictured vision of
that other student of his race--the kinsman who had lived toiling and
had died learning. He came to him a tragic figure in mire-clotted
garments--a youth with aspiring eyes and muck-stained feet. He wondered
what had been his history--that unknown labourer who had sought
knowledge--that philosopher of the plough who had died in ignorance.

"Poor fools!" he said bitterly, "poor fools!" for in his vision that
other student walked not alone.

The next morning he went into Kingsborough at his usual hour, and,
passing his own small office, kept on to where Tom Bassett's name was