for such inner urgings.

The difficulties in the way of such a course would have daunted most
men; but Jim was going strong for the moment, and to him impossibilities
were mere trivialities. The Rev. Obadiah Champ, with others who were
proud of the new convert, took him before the Board of Deacons and there
Jim made his ambitions known. He was illiterate, friendless, penniless,
and already twenty-three. He had no taste for study or a life of
self-control; meekness and spirituality were as much to his liking now
as travelling on a bog is to a blooded horse.

But his magnificent presence, his glib Irish tongue, his ready wit, his
evident warmth and sincerity, were too much for the reverend bearded
ones of the Board. They were carried away, as most humans were, by his
personal charm. They listened with beaming faces. They cast significant
glances at one another. They sent Jim into another room while they
discussed his fate. In twenty minutes he was brought back to hear their
decision. "Yes, they would accept him as a chosen vessel to bear the
grace of God abroad among the people. They would educate him without
expense to himself. He might begin his college career at once."

In the ordinary course, Jim would have set to work with a tutor in Links
to prepare himself to enter Coulter College at the next term. But life
seemed to order itself in unusual ways when it was a question concerning
Jim. He had no home in Links; he had no money to pay a tutor; he was as
eager as a child to begin the serious work; and his ardour burnt all the
barriers away. He became at once an inmate of Coulter, a special protege
of the president's, admitted really as a member of the latter's family,
and bound by many rules and promises. In preparation for his formal
entry he was required to devote six hours a day to study, and those who
knew him of old had given the president a hint to exact from Jim his
"wurd as a mahn" that he would do his daily task.

In looking back on those days Jim used to revile them for their
uselessness and waste. What he did not understand until life had put him
through the fire was that the months at Coulter broke him to harness. It
was beyond the wildest imagining that a youth brought up as Jim had been
should step from a life of boisterous carousing in a backwoods
settlement into a seminary and find congenial or helpful occupation
among books. And yet the shock, the change of environment, the
substitution of discipline