He made a little fight, be it said to his credit; but what virtue faintly said in favour of the Sophocles was boldly contradicted by something else, not virtue, and yet not vice either, which asked, ‘What good is there in Sophocles? I am not to go back to Oxford; I am to go to a ranche in America, or else I am to go to a merchant’s office in town. What good will Greek, or all the finest poetry in the world, do me there? If I were learning bookkeeping by double entry (whatever that may be), it might do me some good--or something about cows; but Sophocles!’ One note of admiration was not half enough to express Jim’s indignant sense of a folly which could not be defended from any point of view. Sophocles! Slaughter, the butcher, who had greasy books to keep, could have shown him a mystery more worth knowing, if he went to an office; and the vet., with all his experience of animals, was a professor worth (to Jim if he went to a ranche) more than Sophocles, Eschylus, and the rest, with the German notes and the English dons all thrown into one. Fancy construing a hard chorus when you should be out after the cows! Fancy spending your time over a disputed passage when you have a batch of letters to write for the mail--much good Sophocles would do a man in either of these circumstances! And to fancy that father, who had such sense in an ordinary way (the day was so bright that Jim felt quite just and amiable even towards his father), should be so bigoted, so ridiculous in this! It may be imagined that after such a self-argument, the sunshine, calling him exactly as one of his comrades used to do, drumming on his window, soon had the best of it. Jim--poor Jim--learned in clandestine movements by the very fact of the anxiety of all about him, listened a little to make sure that the coast was clear. He heard his mother go upstairs, and the voices of the girls in a room they had for their work at the back of the house. All the exits of the house were therefore open to him--not a jealous eye about, not an anxious ear. He strolled out whistling softly, with his hands in his pockets--whistling, thereby convincing himself that he was afraid of nobody; that there was nothing clandestine, or stealthy, or wrong in the whole proceeding, but only that natural inclination towards the fresh air which everybody feels on such a day. When he had got beyond the bounds of the Rectory, and was quite free and at his ease on the public road, with nobody to make him afraid, and Sophocles as much out of the question as if he had never existed, Jim strolled on for a little, enjoying the air, and then paused to think what he should do. That, after all, was not so easy a question to decide. Everybody about was busy with something. No possibility of dropping in upon Mrs. Brown at this hour. There was the river, to be sure: but to go and get a boat, and then to toil up-stream by himself, which either coming or going he would have been obliged to do, seemed