a library gathered like his is a looking-glass in
which the owner's mind is reflected.

The common people about the village did not know what to make of such
a phenomenon. He did not preach, marry, christen, or bury, like the
ministers, nor jog around with medicines for sick folks, nor carry cases
into court for quarrelsome neighbors. What was he good for? Not a great
deal, some of the wiseacres thought,--had "all sorts of sense but common
sense,"--"smart mahn, but not prahctical." There were others who read
him more shrewdly. He knowed more, they said, than all the ministers put
together, and if he'd stan' for Ripresentative they 'd like to vote for
him,--they hed n't hed a smart mahn in the Gineral Court sence Squire
Wibird was thar.

They may have overdone the matter in comparing his knowledge with that
of all the ministers together, for Priest Pemberton was a real scholar
in his special line of study,--as all D. D.'s are supposed to be, or
they would not have been honored with that distinguished title. But Mr.
Byles Gridley not only had more learning than the deep-sea line of the
bucolic intelligence could fathom; he had more wisdom also than they
gave him credit for, even those among them who thought most of his
abilities.

In his capacity of schoolmaster he had sharpened his wits against those
of the lively city boys he had in charge, and made such a reputation
as "Master" Gridley, that he kept that title even after he had become
a college tutor and professor. As a tutor he had to deal with many
of these same boys, and others like them, in the still more vivacious
period of their early college life. He got rid of his police duties when
he became a professor, but he still studied the pupils as carefully as
he used once to watch them, and learned to read character with a skill
which might have fitted him for governing men instead of adolescents.
But he loved quiet and he dreaded mingling with the brawlers of the
market-place, whose stock in trade is a voice and a vocabulary. So
it was that he had passed his life in the patient mechanical labor
of instruction, leaving too many of his instincts and faculties in
abeyance.

The alluvium of all this experience bore a nearer resemblance to worldly
wisdom than might have been conjectured; much nearer, indeed, than it
does in many old instructors, whose eyes get fish-like as their blood
grows cold, and who are not fit to be trusted with anything more
practical than a