f the schools. He was the first for
generations who had aspired to college learning and a profession, and
had trained his tongue by the models of the educated and polite. He
could not help, at times, the relapse of his thoughts, and their
speaking to himself in the dialect of his family and his ancestors.
"She's 'way above me, and I ought to ha' known it," he further said,
with the meekness of an humble but fiercely independent race, which
is meek to itself alone. He would have maintained his equality with
his last breath to an opponent; in his heart of hearts he felt
himself below the scion of the one old gentle family of his native
village.

This young Evelina, by the fine dignity which had been born with her
and not acquired by precept and example, by the sweetly formal
diction which seemed her native tongue, had filled him with awe. Now,
when he thought she was angered with him, he felt beneath her lady
feet, his nostrils choked with a spiritual dust of humiliation.

He went forward blindly. The dusk had deepened; from either side of
the road, from the mysterious gloom of the bushes, came the twangs of
the katydids, like some coarse rustic quarrellers, each striving for
the last word in a dispute not even dignified by excess of passion.

Suddenly somebody jostled him to his own side of the path. "That you,
Thomas? Where you been?" said a voice in his ear.

"That you, father? Down to the post-office."

"Who was that you was talkin' with back there?"

"Miss Evelina Leonard."

"That girl that's stayin' there--to the old Squire's?"

"Yes." The son tried to move on, but his father stood before him
dumbly for a minute. "I must be going, father. I've got to work on my
sermon," Thomas said, impatiently.

"Wait a minute," said his father. "I've got something to say to ye,
Thomas, an' this is as good a time to say it as any. There ain't
anybody 'round. I don't know as ye'll thank me for it--but mother
said the other day that she thought you'd kind of an idea--she said
you asked her if she thought it would be anything out of the way for
you to go up to the Squire's to make a call. Mother she thinks you
can step in anywheres, but I don't know. I know your book-learnin'
and your bein' a minister has set you up a good deal higher than your
mother and me and any of our folks, and I feel as if you were good
enough for anybody, as far as that goes; but that ain't all. Some
folks have different startin'-points in this wor