rves will not
listen to anything but a permanent tenure of his office. All of which
seems to indicate to me that he has abandoned, for the while at least,
his intention to turn quite all the pages of the world's great book, and
is content to live true to the ideal that was born in the log
schoolhouse--the conviction that the true life is the life of service,
and that the love of wandering and the lure of gold are only siren calls
that lead one always toward, but never to, the promised land of dreams
that seems to lie just over the western range where the pink sunset
stands sharp against the purple shadows.

The ending of my story is prosaic, but everything in this world is
prosaic, unless you view it either in the perspective of time or space,
or in the contrasts that bring out the high lights and deepen the
shadows.

But if I have left my hero happily married to his profession, the
courtship and winning of which formed the theme of my tale, I may be
permitted to indulge in a very little moralizing of a rather more
explicit sort than I have yet attempted.

It is a simple matter to construct in imagination an ideal teacher. Mix
with immortal youth and abounding health, a maximal degree of knowledge
and a maximal degree of experience, add perfect tact, the spirit of true
service, the most perfect patience, and the most steadfast persistence;
place in the crucible of some good normal school; stir in twenty weeks
of standard psychology, ten weeks of general method, and varying
amounts of patent compounds known as special methods, all warranted pure
and without drugs or poison; sweeten with a little music, toughen with
fifteen weeks of logic, bring to a slow boil in the practice school,
and, while still sizzling, turn loose on a cold world. The formula is
simple and complete, but like many another good recipe, a competent cook
might find it hard to follow when she is short of butter and must
shamefully skimp on the eggs.

Now the man whose history I have recounted represents the most priceless
qualities of this formula. In the first place he possessed that quality
the key to which the philosophers of all ages have sought in vain,--he
had solved the problem of eternal youth. At the age of sixty-five his
enthusiasm was the enthusiasm of an adolescent. His energy was the
energy of an adolescent. Despite his gray hair and white beard, his mind
was perennially young. And that is the only type of mind that ought to
be concern