I was walking so fast that he was almost trotting to keep up with me. "Right there I was weak," he said. "I thought of what a bright creature my girl was, thought of what education would do for her, thought that I could soon pay back the money, and I agreed. And I want to tell you that it has been hot ashes on me ever since. They are goin' to marry all right enough, but it galls me to think that I had to send her out to have her educated at another man's expense--cuts me to think that she wasn't good enough for any man just as I could give her to him. And I'm goin' to pay back that money if I have to sell this strip of poor dirt, that's what I'm goin' to do. Yes, sir, even if it's ten years after they are married. Chyd is off at school now, and has been for a long time; only comes home for a while at vacation, and it seems to me that if he's goin' to be a doctor it's time he was at it. But I understand that they are goin' to send him to another place after he gits through with this one. I don't know much about him, but they say that he's a first-rate sort of a fellow. Oh, I knowed him well enough when he was little, but I haven't seen so very much of him since he growed up. Guinea thinks all the world of him, of course, and says that they were born for each other. Gimme that plow here. You don't know how to tote it nohow. I'm not goin' right straight back to the field; I'm goin' to the house. Them hot ashes is on me an inch thick." I let him take the plow; I left him at the draw bars, and with heavy and dragging feet I climbed up to my room. I sat down to my desk, but not with elbows resting on the board, not with my chin in my hands; I couldn't bear to think of that attitude. Now, I understood why she had said "Oh" with such coolness when I had declared that I hated doctors. My heart was freezing, my head was hot, and in a fevered fancy I saw Guinea and that boy playing up and down the rivulet. I saw them wading in the water; heard him tell her that when they grew up she must be his wife, and I saw her, holding her dress about her ankles, look up at him and smile. I knew that he had never been awkward, I knew that he looked like Bentley, knew that he would have made fun of me, and down in my heart there was a poisonous hatred, yellow, green, venomous. I am seeking to hide nothing; I cannot paint myself as a generous and high-minded man. When stirred, I seem to have more rank sap than other men--less reason, more senseless passion. I roared at the picture, sitting there gripping the desk, and frightened it away; and to myself I acknowledged the faults which I now set forth, but an acknowledgment of a fault is not within itself virtue. The fool's recourse is to call himself a fool, to upbraid himself, curse himself and then in graciousness to pardon himself. You might as well reason with a rattlesnake, striking at you--might as well seek to temporize and argue with a dog drooling hydrophobic foam, as to tell the human heart what it