I do not know whether or not he said it unwittingly or with intent to sting me. But at any rate the thrust went home. I could hardly wait till my father had got through with his work that night, and was stretched in his easy-chair, his long pipe in one hand and a volume of Martial in the other. I broke in upon him with the words, "Father, I want to go to college with Freddie Esquillant!" My father looked at me in surprise. I can see him still staring at me bemazed with his pipe half-way to his mouth, and the open book laid face downward upon his knee. "Go to college--you?" His surprise was more cutting than Uncle Rob's mockery. Because, you see, my father knew. That is, he knew my scholarship. What he did not know was how much of my grandmother's spirit there was in me, and how I could keep working on and on if I had the chance. "You have thought of this long?" he asked. "No, father!" "Ah, well, what put it into your head?" he asked kindly. This I could hardly tell him without entering into my furious foolish jealousy of Uncle Rob, his waiting at the mill, and our exchange of words. So I only said, "It just came to me that I would like to get learning, father!" "Ah, yes," he meditated, "that is mostly the way. It is like heavenly grace. It comes to a man when he least expects it--the desire for learning. We seek it diligently with tears. It comes not. We wake in the morning and lo! it is there!" It is characteristic of my father that even then he did not concern himself about ways and means. For at the colleges of our land are "bursaries" provided by pious patrons, once poor themselves, and often with a thirst for knowledge unquenched--boys put too early to the bench or the counter. Now my father had the way of winning these for his pupils. He did not teach them directly how to gain them, but he supplied the inspiration. "Read much and well. Get the spirit. Learn the grammar, certainly. But read Latin--till you can speak Latin, think Latin. It is more difficult to think Greek. Our stiff-necked, stubborn Lowland nature, produce of half-a-score of conquering nations, has not the right suppleness. But if there is any poetry in you, it will find you out when you read Euripides." So though certainly I never got so far--the verbs irregular giving me a distaste for the business--at least I fell into line, and in due time--but there I am anticipating. I am writing of the day, the wonderful day when the sharp spur of Uncle Rob's reproach entered into my soul and I resolved to be--I hardly knew what. A band of little boys, all eager to see the pirn-mill in the Marnhoul wood, volunteered to accompany Louis home. They went on ahead, gambolling and shouting. Agnes Anne would have come also, but I suggested to her that she had better stay and help her mother.