Sometimes he lets me leave my lesson and go to the great pile of cobs that fall from the corn-sheller, and go over these to take off the kernels that the sheller left. But in a little while my hands are so red and sore that I am glad to go back to my Latin word again. Then he lets me cut the weeds along the edges of the mill-race; but the constant stooping hurts my back, and the sun is hot, and this, too, soon grows to be like work, and no easier than sitting on the high stool with the Latin grammar in my hand. Now and then a farmer drives up to the mill with his team of horses or slow heavy oxen, and I try to make myself useful in helping him to unload the grain. This is easier than shelling corn or cutting weeds or learning Latin; for it is only a little time until the farmer is gone, and then perhaps another takes his place. Somehow I never want these farmers or the boys to know that I am studying Latin at the mill, for they would wonder why my father made me study Latin, and what he could possibly see in me to make him think it worth the while. I wondered, too, when I was young; I could not understand why he should make me study it, as if his life and mine depended on the Latin that I learned. Surely he knew that I did not like Latin, and at best learned it slowly and with the greatest pains, and there was little promise in the efforts that he made in my behalf. I could not then know why my father took all this trouble for me to learn my grammar; but I know to-day. I know that, all unconsciously, it was the blind persistent effort of the parent to resurrect his own buried hopes and dead ambitions in the greater opportunities and broader life that he would give his child. Poor man! I trust the lingering spark of hope for me never left his bosom while he lived, and that he died unconscious that the son on whom he lavished so much precious time and care never learned Latin after all, and never could.