"What was my Uncle Nick Sales like?" asked Nicholas indifferently. He knew the name, but he had never heard the man's story. "All book larnin' an' mighty little sense--just like you," replied his stepmother with repressed pride in her voice. "Could read the Bible in an outlandish tongue an' was too big a fool to come in out of the rain. He used to sit up all night at his books--an' fall asleep the next day at the plough. He was the wisest fool I ever see." "Poor fool!" said Nicholas softly. It was the epitaph over the unmarked grave of that other member of his race who had blazed the thorny path before him. A strange, pathetic figure rose suddenly in his vision--a man with a great brow and a twisted back, with brawny, knotted hands--an unlearned student driving the plough, an ignorant philosopher dragging the mire. "Poor fool!" he said again. "What did his learning do for him?" "It killed him," returned his stepmother shortly. She stood before him wiping her gnarled hands on her soiled apron. His gaze fell upon her, and he wondered angrily whence sprung her indomitable energy--the energy that could expend itself upon potatoes. Her face was sharpened until it seemed to become all feature--there were hollows in the narrow temples, and where the pale, thin hair was drawn tightly over the head he could trace the prominent bones of the skull. As he looked at her his own petty suffering was overshadowed by the visible tragedy of her life--the sordid tragedy where unconsciousness was pathos. He reached out quickly and took a corner of her apron in his hand. It was the strongest demonstration of affection he had ever made to her. "I'll sort them, ma," he said lightly. "There's not a speck in the lot of them too fine for my eyes." And he knelt down beside the earthy heap. But when he went up to his room an hour later and lighted his kerosene lamp, it was not of his stepmother that he was thinking--nor was it of Eugenia. His stiffened muscles contracted in physical pain, and his brain was deadened by the sense of unutterable defeat. The delirium of his anger had passed away; the fever of his skin had chilled beneath the cold sweat that broke over him--in the reaction from the madness that had gripped him he was conscious of a sanity almost sublime. The habitual balance of his nature had swung back into place. He got out his books and arranged them as usual beside the lamp. Then he took up the volume he had been reading and held it unopened in his hands. He stared straight before him at the whitewashed wall of the little room, at the rough pine bedstead, at the crude washstand, at the coloured calendar above.