of
cautious poverty. Mrs. Irwin had labored in kitchen and sewing room until
Jim had been able to assume the breadwinner's burden--which he did about
the time he finished the curriculum of the Woodruff District school. He
was an off ox and odd as Dick's hatband, largely because his duties to his
mother and his love of reading kept him from joining the gangs whereof I
have spoken. His duties, his mother, and his father's status as an outcast
were to him the equivalent of the Byronic club foot, because they took
away his citizenship in Boyville, and drove him in upon himself, and, at
first, upon his school books which he mastered so easily and quickly as to
become the star pupil of the Woodruff District school, and later upon
Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin and the poets, and the agricultural reports and
bulletins.

All this degraded--or exalted--him to the position of an intellectual
farm-hand, with a sense of superiority and a feeling of degradation. It
made Jennie Woodruff's "Humph!" potent to keep him awake that night, and
send him to the road work with Colonel Woodruff's team next morning with
hot eyes and a hotter heart.

What was he anyhow? And what could he ever be? What was the use of his
studies in farming practise, if he was always to be an underling whose
sole duty was to carry out the crude ideas of his employers? And what
chance was there for a farm-hand to become a farm owner, or even a farm
renter, especially if he had a mother to support out of the twenty-five or
thirty dollars of his monthly wages? None.

A man might rise in the spirit, but how about rising in the world?

Colonel Woodruff's gray percherons seemed to feel the unrest of their
driver, for they fretted and actually executed a clumsy prance as Jim
Irwin pulled them up at the end of the turnpike across Bronson's Slew--the
said slew being a peat-marsh which annually offered the men of the
Woodruff District the opportunity to hold the male equivalent of a sewing
circle while working out their road taxes, with much conversational gain,
and no great damage to the road.

In fact, Columbus Brown, the pathmaster, prided himself on the Bronson
Slew Turnpike as his greatest triumph in road engineering. The work
consisted in hauling, dragging and carrying gravel out on the low fill
which carried the road across the marsh, and then watching it slowly
settle until the next summer.

"Haul gravel from the east gravel bed, Jim," called Columbus Brown from
th