"The school board's against him, for one thing," replied the colonel. "They'll fire him if they get a chance. They're the laughing-stock of the country for hiring him by mistake, and they're irritated. But after seeing him perform to-night, I wonder if he can't make good." "If he could _feel_ like anything but an underling he'd succeed," said Jennie. "That's his heredity," stated the colonel, whose live-stock operations were based on heredity. "Jim's a scrub, I suppose; but he acts as if he might turn out to be a Brown Mouse." "What do you mean, pa," scoffed Jennie--"a Brown Mouse!" "A fellow in Edinburgh," said the colonel, "crossed the Japanese waltzing mouse with the common white mouse. Jim's pedling father was a waltzing mouse, no good except to jump from one spot to another for no good reason. Jim's mother is an albino of a woman, with all the color washed out in one way or another. Jim ought to be a mongrel, and I've always considered him one. But the Edinburgh fellow every once in a while got out of his variously-colored, waltzing and albino hybrids, a brown mouse. It wasn't a common house mouse, either, but a wild mouse unlike any he had ever seen. It ran away, and bit and gnawed, and raised hob. It was what we breeders call a Mendelian segregation of genetic factors that had been in the waltzers and albinos all the time--their original wild ancestor of the woods and fields. If Jim turns out to be a Brown Mouse, he may be a bigger man than any of us. Anyhow, I'm for him." "He'll have to be a big man to make anything out of the job of a country school-teacher," said Jennie. "Any job's as big as the man who holds it down," said her father. Next day, Jim received a letter from Jennie. * * * * * "Dear Jim," it ran. "Father says you are sure to have a hard time--the school board's against you, and all that. But he added, 'I'm for Jim, anyhow!' I thought you'd like to know this. Also he said, 'Any job's as big as the man who holds it down,' And I believe this also, _and I'm for you, too!_ You are doing wonders even before the school starts in getting the pupils interested in a lot of things, which, while they don't belong to school work, will make them friends of yours. I don't see how this will help you much, but it's a fine thing, and shows your interest in them. Don't be too original. The wheel runs easiest in the beaten track. Yours. Jennie." Jennie's caution made no impression on Jim--but he put the letter away, and every evening took it out and read the italicized words, _"I'm for you, too!"_ The colonel's dictum, "Any job's as big as the man who holds it down," was an Emersonian truism to Jim. It reduced all jobs to an equality, and it meant equality in intellectual and spiritual development. It didn't mean, for instance, that any job was as good as another in making it possible for a man to marry--and Jennie Woodruff's "Humph!" returned to kill and drag off her "I'm for you, too!"