Jude showed that he did not understand.

"Why, to the seat of l'arning--the 'City of Light' you used to talk

to us about as a little boy! Is it all you expected of it?"

"Yes; more!" cried Jude.

"When I was there once for an hour I didn't see much in it for my

part; auld crumbling buildings, half church, half almshouse, and not

much going on at that."

"You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets the eye of a

man walking through the streets. It is a unique centre of thought

and religion--the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country.

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All that silence and absence of goings-on is the stillness of

infinite motion--the sleep of the spinning-top, to borrow the simile

of a well-known writer."

"Oh, well, it med be all that, or it med not. As I say, I didn't see

nothing of it the hour or two I was there; so I went in and had a pot

o' beer, and a penny loaf, and a ha'porth o' cheese, and waited till

it was time to come along home. You've j'ined a college by this

time, I suppose?"

"Ah, no!" said Jude. "I am almost as far off that as ever."

"How so?"

Jude slapped his pocket.

"Just what we thought! Such places be not for such as you--only for

them with plenty o' money."

"There you are wrong," said Jude, with some bitterness. "They are

for such ones!"

Still, the remark was sufficient to withdraw Jude's attention from

the imaginative world he had lately inhabited, in which an abstract

figure, more or less himself, was steeping his mind in a sublimation

of the arts and sciences, and making his calling and election sure

to a seat in the paradise of the learned. He was set regarding his

prospects in a cold northern light. He had lately felt that he

could not quite satisfy himself in his Greek--in the Greek of

the dramatists particularly. So fatigued was he sometimes after

his day's work that he could not maintain the critical attention

necessary for thorough application. He felt that he wanted a

coach--a friend at his elbow to tell him in a moment what sometimes

would occupy him a weary month in extracting from unanticipative,

clumsy books.

It was decidedly necessary to consider facts a little more closely

than he had done of late. What was the good, after all, of using

up his spare hours in a vague labour called "private study" without

giving an outlook on practicabilities?




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