'So I spoke to father. He didn’t say much, but I noticed he didn’t seem keen about it. He’d bought the store at the Corners two years before, and it seemed to me it would work out pretty well if he sold the farm and just tended store and had a little house in Garibaldi, as he and mother got along in years.
'I thought likely Sarah would marry, and anybody might be sure Cynthy would. She an’ Sarah had had two years' schooling in Oatesville by this time, and they held themselves a bit high. Cynthy was grown up that pretty and dainty you caught your breath when you looked at her. There’s some young girls have that dazzling kind of a look. When you lay eyes on them, it hardly seems as if it could be true they looked like that. Cynthy was one of that kind.
'My plans took shape in my mind the second winter I taught. I set my heart on teaching one more year and then going to school somewhere myself. I got the State University catalogue and began to plan the studying I did nights so it would help me enter.
'It was just then that I ran against the proposition of teaching Greek. A boy from York State come out to spend the winter with an uncle whose farm joined ours. He’d lost his father, and I guess his mother didn’t know what to do with him. I don’t mean Dick wasn’t a good boy, but likely he was a handful for a woman.
'Living so near, we saw a lot of him. He was always coming in evenings to see the girls, and he pretended to go to school, too. He was sort of uppish in his ways, and I knew he made fun of me and my teaching, all around among the neighbors. What did he do one day but bring me some beginning Greek exercises to look over, with his head in the air as if he was sayin', "Guess I’ve got you now!"
'I took his exercises and looked at 'em, awful wise, and said those was all right, that time. Bless you, I didn’t know Alphy from Omegy, but I meant to, mighty quick! I walked seven miles an’ back that evening to borrow some Greek books of a man I knew had 'em, and sat up till two o’clock, tryin' to get the hang of the alphabet.
'Well, sir! I just pitched into those books an’ tore the innards out of 'em, and then I pitched into that fellow. You’d ought to have seen him open his eyes when he found I knew what I was talkin' about! He got tired of his Greek inside of two weeks. But I held him to it. I made him keep right on, and I did the same, and kept ahead of him.
'It interested me awfully, that Greek. I borrowed some more books and got me some translations. I don’t say I got so I could read it easy, but I got on to a lot of new ideas. There was one book about a fellow who was strapped to a rock for a thousand years for bringing the fire of the gods to mortals. Probably you’ve heard of it. I liked that.'
All this sounded to me a good deal like a fairy-tale the old gentleman was telling. Of course, all education is so much more rigid nowadays, that the idea of anybody pitching in that way, and grabbing the heart out of any form of knowledge was novel to me. Yet I’d read in the biographies of great men that such things had really been done. Only—Mr. Miles wasn’t a great man. How, then, had he come to accomplish what I understood was essentially an achievement of genius? The thing staggered me.
'"Prometheus Bound,"' said Seth Miles meditatively. 'That’s the one. You may think I was conceited, but it seemed to me I knew how that man felt. To make them look up! To kindle the flame! Didn’t I know how a man could long to do that? Wouldn’t I, too, risk the anger of the gods if I could fire those children’s minds the way my own was fired?