“Lord!”
“You think I wouldn't, do you?” asked Jerome, angrily.
“I'd be more inclined to believe ye if I see ye more generous with what ye've got to give now.”
Jerome started, and stared at his uncle's face, which, in the freezing moonlight, looked harder, and more possessed of an inscrutable bitterness of wisdom. “What d'ye mean?” he asked, sharply. “What on earth have I got to give, I'd like to know?”
Ozias Lamb tapped his head. “How about that?” he asked. “How about the strength you're puttin' into algebry an' Latin? You don't expect ever to learn enough to teach, do ye?”
Jerome shook his head.
“Well, then it's jest to improve your own mind. Improve your mind—what's that? What good is that goin' to do your fellow-bin's? I tell ye, Jerome, ye ain't givin' away what you've got to give, an' we ain't none of us.”
“Maybe you're right,” Jerome said, after a little.
After having left his uncle, he walked more slowly still. Soon the Squire and his friends were quite out of sight. The moonlight was very full and brilliant, the trees were crooked in hard lines, and the snow-drifts crested with white lights of ice; there was no softening of spring in anything, but the young man felt within him one of those flooding stirs of the spirit which every spring faintly symbolizes. A great passion of love and sympathy for the needy and oppressed of his kind, and an ardent defence of them, came upon Jerome Edwards, poor young shoemaker, going home with his sack of meal over his shoulder. Like a bird, which in the spring views every little straw and twig as towards his nest and purpose of love, Jerome would henceforth regard all powers and instrumentalities that came in his way only in their bearing upon his great end of life.
On reaching home that night he packed away his algebra and his Latin books on the shelf in his room, and began a new study the next evening.