ng, one of
a file of twenty moving along against the sky like shapes painted
on glass, and up the back slide without stopping. All boys except
herself; and then they'd cheer her, and then she'd say, 'Don't be
saucy, boys,' and suddenly run indoors. They'd try to coax her out
again. But 'a wouldn't come."

These retrospective visions of Sue only made Jude the more miserable
that he was unable to woo her, and he left the cottage of his aunt
that day with a heavy heart. He would fain have glanced into the
school to see the room in which Sue's little figure had so glorified
itself; but he checked his desire and went on.

It being Sunday evening some villagers who had known him during his
residence here were standing in a group in their best clothes. Jude
was startled by a salute from one of them:

"Ye've got there right enough, then!"

Jude showed that he did not understand.

"Why, to the seat of l'arning--the 'City of Light' you used to talk
to us about as a little boy! Is it all you expected of it?"

"Yes; more!" cried Jude.

"When I was there once for an hour I didn't see much in it for my
part; auld crumbling buildings, half church, half almshouse, and not
much going on at that."

"You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets the eye of a
man walking through the streets. It is a unique centre of thought
and religion--the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country.
All that silence and absence of goings-on is the stillness of
infinite motion--the sleep of the spinning-top, to borrow the simile
of a well-known writer."

"Oh, well, it med be all that, or it med not. As I say, I didn't see
nothing of it the hour or two I was there; so I went in and had a pot
o' beer, and a penny loaf, and a ha'porth o' cheese, and waited till
it was time to come along home. You've j'ined a college by this
time, I suppose?"

"Ah, no!" said Jude. "I am almost as far off that as ever."

"How so?"

Jude slapped his pocket.

"Just what we thought! Such places be not for such as you--only for
them with plenty o' money."

"There you are wrong," said Jude, with some bitterness. "They are
for such ones!"

Still, the remark was sufficient to withdraw Jude's attention from
the imaginative world he had lately inhabited, in which an abstract
figure, more or less himself, was steeping his mind in a sublimation
of the arts and sciences, and making his calling and election sure
to a seat in the paradise o