Then it was however that Tom Edwards fell down from his high place. There he was, a tall boy, almost of man’s stature and, except for a few months during the winters when he lived on the Whitehead farms, and between his sixth and thirteenth years, when he had attended a country school and had learned to read and write and do sums, he was without education. And now, during that very fall of the year of his triumph at Columbus, the Bidwell truant officer, a thin man with white hair, who was also superintendent of the Baptist Sunday School, came one afternoon to the Whitehead stables and told him that if he did not begin going to school both he and his employer would get into serious trouble. Harry Whitehead was furious and so was Tom. There he was, a great tall slender fellow who had been with race horses to the fairs all over Northern Ohio and Indiana, during that very fall, and who had just come home from the journey during which he had driven the winner in the free-for-all trot at a Grand Circuit meeting and had given Bucephalus a mark of 2.06¼. Was such a fellow to go sit in a schoolroom, with a silly school book in his hand, reading of the affairs of the men who dealt in butter, eggs, potatoes and apples, and whose unnecessarily complicated business life the children were asked to unravel,—was such a fellow to go sit in a room, under the eyes of a woman teacher, and in the company of boys half his age and with none of his wide experience of life? It was a hard thought and Tom took it hard. The law was all right, Harry Whitehead said, and was intended to keep noaccount kids off the streets but what it had to do with himself Tom couldn’t make out. When the truant officer had gone and Tom was left alone in the stable with his employer the man and boy stood for a long time glumly staring at each other. It was all right to be educated but Tom felt he had book education enough. He could read, write and do sums, and what other book-training did a horseman need? As for books, they were all right for rainy evenings when there were no men sitting by the stable door and talking of horses and races. And also when one went to the races in a strange town and arrived, perhaps on Sunday, and the races did not begin until the following Wednesday—it was all right then to have a book in the chest with the horse blankets. When the weather was fine and the work was all done on a fine fall afternoon, and the other swipes, both niggers and whites, had gone off to town, one could take a book out under a tree and read of life in far away places that was as strange and almost as fascinating as one’s own life. Tom had read “Robinson Crusoe,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Tales from the Bible,” all of which he had found in the Whitehead house and Jacob Friedman, the school superintendent at Bidwell, who had a fancy for horses, had loaned him other books that he intended reading during the coming winter. They were