al helpfulness in the language. And his view of
efficiency was that it is the capacity to see opportunity where others
overlook it, and make the most of it.

All through his life he had had his own plans for becoming great. He was
to be a general, hurling back the foes of his country; he was to be the
nation's master in literature; a successful drawing on his slate had
filled him with ambition, confidently entertained, of becoming a
Rubens--and the story of Benjamin West in his school reader fanned this
spark to a flame; science, too, had at times been his chosen field; and
when he had built a mousetrap which actually caught mice, he saw himself a
millionaire inventor. As for being president, that was a commonplace in
his dreams. And all the time, he was barefooted, ill-clad and dreamed his
dreams to the accompaniment of the growl of the plow cutting the roots
under the brown furrow-slice, or the wooshing of the milk in the pail. At
twenty-eight, he considered these dreams over.

As for this new employment, he saw no great opportunity in it. Of any
spark of genius he was to show in it, of anything he was to suffer in it,
of those pains and penalties wherewith the world pays its geniuses, Jim
Irwin anticipated nothing. He went into the small, mean, ill-paid task as
a part of the day's work, with no knowledge of the stirring of the nation
for a different sort of rural school, and no suspicion that there lay in
it any highway to success in life. He was not a college man or even a
high-school man. All his other dreams had found rude awakening in the fact
that he had not been able to secure the schooling which geniuses need in
these days. He was unfitted for the work geniuses do. All he was to be was
a rural teacher, accidentally elected by a stupid school board, and with a
hard tussle before him to stay on the job for the term of his contract. He
could have accepted positions quite as good years ago, save for the fact
that they would have taken him away from his mother, their cheap little
home, their garden and their fowls. He rather wondered why he had allowed
Jennie's sneer to sting him into the course of action which put him in
this new relation to his neighbors.

But, true to his belief in honest thorough work, like a general preparing
for battle, he examined his field of operations. His manner of doing this
seemed to prove to Colonel Woodruff, who watched it with keen interest as
something new in the world, that Jim I