eiving letters, and she never received enough of
them. He used to say, "Good morning, miss. My mate started off with a
tremendous heavy bag to-day. I expect the most of it was for you.
You'll find 'em when you get home this evening--shoals of 'em."

Walking fast on his round he rehearsed such little speeches, and if
she made an unanticipated answer he was baffled and confused. He
suffered from an extreme shyness when face to face with her.

Then all at once his overwhelming admiration gave him a hot flow of
language. Beginning the old cumbrous facetiousness about her
correspondence, he blurted out the true thoughts that he had begun to
entertain.

"You didn't ought to want for letters, miss, and you wouldn't--not if
I was your letter-writer. I'd send you a valentine every day of the
year."

As he spoke, he looked at her with burning eyes. He was astonished,
almost terrified by his hardiness; and what he detected of its effect
on her threw him into an indescribable state of emotion.

Rough and coarse he might be, and yet not truly disagreeable to her
fine senses; his freckled face and massive shoulders did not repel
her; no instinct of the lovely princess turned sick at these advances
of the wild man of the woods. Under his scrutiny she showed a sort of
fluttered helplessness, a mingling of beauty and weakness that sent
fiery messages thrilling through and through him, a pale tremor, a
soft glow, a troubled but not offended frown; and from beneath all
these surface manifestations the undeveloped woman in her seemed to
speak to the matured manhood in him--seemed to say without words, "Oh,
dear me, what is this? I hope you haven't taken a real fancy to my
whiteness and slenderness and tremulousness; because if you _have_,
you are so big and so strong that I know you'll get me in the end."

That was the crucial moment of his marvelous life. After that all his
dreams fused and became one. He felt as if from soft metal he had
changed into hard metal. And, moreover, the stimulus of love seemed to
induce a vast intellectual growth; things that had been difficult of
comprehension became lucidly clear; prejudices and ignorances fell
away from him of their own accord. A shut world had suddenly become an
open world.

As a grown man he returned to the benches of evening school. He
learned to write his beautiful copper-plate hand, and knocked the
bottom out of arithmetic and geography. Then came sheer erudition--the
nature o