rse for their male victims, and so
Jennie slept very well that night.

Great events, I find myself repeating, sometimes hinge on trivial things.
Considered deeply, all those matters which we are wont to call great
events are only the outward and visible results of occurrences in the
minds and souls of people. Sir Walter Raleigh thought of laying his cloak
under the feet of Queen Elizabeth as she passed over a mud-puddle, and all
the rest of his career followed, as the effect of Sir Walter's mental
attitude. Elias Howe thought of a machine for sewing, Eli Whitney of a
machine for ginning cotton, George Stephenson of a tubular boiler for his
locomotive engine, and Cyrus McCormick of a sickle-bar, and the world was
changed by those thoughts, rather than by the machines themselves. John D.
Rockefeller thought strongly that he would be rich, and this thought, and
not the Standard Oil Company, changed the commerce and finance of the
world. As a man thinketh so is he; and as men think so is the world. Jim
Irwin went home thinking of the "Humph!" of Jennie Woodruff--thinking with
hot waves and cold waves running over his body, and swellings in his
throat. Such thoughts centered upon his club foot made Lord Byron a great
sardonic poet. That club foot set him apart from the world of boys and
tortured him into a fury which lasted until he had lashed society with the
whips of his scorn.

Jim Irwin was not club-footed; far from it. He was bony and rugged and
homely, with a big mouth, and wide ears, and a form stooped with labor. He
had fine, lambent, gentle eyes which lighted up his face when he smiled,
as Lincoln's illuminated his. He was not ugly. In fact, if that quality
which fair ladies--if they are wise--prize far more than physical beauty,
the quality called charm, can with propriety be ascribed to a field-hand
who has just finished a day of the rather unfragrant labor to which I have
referred, Jim Irwin possessed charm. That is why little Jennie Woodruff
had asked him to help with her lessons, rather oftener than was necessary,
in those old days in the Woodruff schoolhouse when Jennie wore her hair
down her back.

But in spite of this homely charm of personality, Jim Irwin was set off
from his fellows of the Woodruff neighborhood in a manner quite as
segregative as was Byron by his deformity. He was different. In local
parlance, he was an off ox. He was as odd as Dick's hatband. He ran in a
gang by himself, like Deacon Ave