ry's celebrated bull. He failed to
matriculate in the boy banditti which played cards in the haymows on rainy
days, told stereotyped stories that smelled to heaven, raided melon
patches and orchards, swore horribly like Sir Toby Belch, and played pool
in the village saloon. He had always liked to read, and had piles of
literature in his attic room which was good, because it was cheap. Very
few people know that cheap literature is very likely to be good, because
it is old and unprotected by copyright. He had Emerson, Thoreau, a John B.
Alden edition of Chambers' _Encyclopedia of English Literature_, some
Franklin Square editions of standard poets in paper covers, and a few
Ruskins and Carlyles--all read to rags. He talked the book English of
these authors, mispronouncing many of the hard words, because he had never
heard them pronounced by any one except himself, and had no standards of
comparison. You find this sort of thing in the utterances of self-educated
recluses. And he had piles of reports of the secretary of agriculture,
college bulletins from Ames, and publications of the various bureaus of
the Department of Agriculture at Washington. In fact, he had a good
library of publications which can be obtained gratis, or very cheaply--and
he knew their contents. He had a personal philosophy, which while it had
cost him the world in which his fellows lived, had given him one of his
own, in which he moved as lonely as a cloud, and as untouched of the life
about him.

He seemed superior to the neighbor boys, and felt so; but this feeling was
curiously mingled with a sense of degradation. By every test of common
life, he was a failure. His family history was a badge of failure. People
despised a man who was so incontestably smarter than they, and yet could
do no better with himself than to work in the fields alongside the tramps
and transients and hoboes who drifted back and forth as the casual market
for labor and the lure of the cities swept them. Save for his mother and
their cow and garden and flock of fowls and their wretched little rented
house, he was a tramp himself.

His father had been no better. He had come into the neighborhood from
nobody knows where, selling fruit trees, with a wife and baby in his old
buggy--and had died suddenly, leaving the baby and widow, and nothing else
save the horse and buggy. That horse and buggy were still on the Irwin
books represented by Spot the cow--so persistent are the assets