Far worse, however, than all this, he had lately acquired a reputation as a faith-healer. It was claimed for him by certain ignorant people at Grayfield and Oakshott that by means of Christian Science he had cured deafness, rheumatism and other minor ills to which the local flesh was heir. The vicar had been too impatient of the whole matter to investigate it. On the face of it the thing was quite absurd. In his eyes John Smith was hardly better than a yokel, although a man of superior education for his rank of life. Indeed, in Mr. Perry-Hennington’s opinion, that was where the real root of the mischief lay. The mother, who was very poor, had contrived, by means of the needle, and by denying herself almost the necessities of life, to send the lad for several years to the grammar school at the neighboring town of Brombridge, where he had undoubtedly gained the rudiments of an education far in advance of any the village school had to offer. John had proved a boy of almost abnormal ability; and the high master of the grammar school had been sadly disappointed that he did not find his way to Oxford with a scholarship. Unfortunately the boy’s health had always been delicate. He had suffered from epilepsy, and this fact, by forbidding a course of regular study, prevented a lad of great promise obtaining at an old university the mental discipline of which he was thought to stand in need. The vicar considered it was this omission which had marred the boy’s life. None of the learned professions was open to him; his education was both inadequate and irregular; moreover, the precarious state of his health forbade any form of permanent employment. Situations of a clerical kind had been found for him from time to time which he had been compelled to give up. Physically slight, he had never been fit for hard manual labor. Indeed, the only work with his hands for which he had shown any aptitude was at the carpenter’s bench, and for some years now he had eked out his mother’s slender means by assisting the village joiner. The unfortunate part of the matter was, however, that the end was not here. Mentally, there could be no doubt, John Smith, a man now approaching thirty, was far beyond the level of the carpenter’s bench. His mind, in the vicar’s opinion, was deplorably ill-regulated, but in certain of its aspects he was ready to admit that it had both originality and power. The mother was a daughter of a Baptist minister in Wales, a fact which tended to raise her son beyond the level of his immediate surroundings; but that apart, the village carpenter’s assistant had never yielded his boyish passion for books. He continued to read increasingly, books to test and search a vigorous mind. Moreover, he had an astonishing faculty of memory, and at times wrote poetry of a mystical, ultra-imaginative kind.