Mr. Hofmyer was waiting to give Jim the final convincing proof that he had produced an effect with his speech.

“Do you teach the kind of school you lay out in your talk?” he asked.

“I try to,” said Jim, “and I believe I do.”

“Well,” said Mr. Hofmyer, “that’s the kind of education I b’lieve in. I kep’ school back in Pennsylvany fifty years ago, and I made the scholars measure things, and weigh things, and apply their studies as fur as I could.”

“All good teachers have always done that,” said Jim. “Froebel, Pestalozzi, Colonel Parker—they all had the idea which is at the bottom of my work; ‘learn to do by doing,’ and connecting up the school with life.”

“M’h’m,” grunted Mr. Hofmyer, “I hain’t been able to see how Latin connects up with a high-school kid’s life—unless he can find a Latin settlement som’eres and git a job clerkin’ in a store.”

“But it used to relate to life,” said Jim, “the life of the people who made Greek and Latin a part of everybody else’s education as well as their own. Latin and Greek were the only languages in which anything worth much was written, you know. But now”—Jim spread out his arms as if to take in the whole world—“science, the marvelous literature of our tongue in the last three centuries! And to make a child learn Latin with all that, a thousand times richer than all the literature of Latin, lying unused before him!”

“Know any Latin?” asked Mr. Hofmyer.

Jim blushed, as one caught in condemning what he knows nothing about.

“I—I have studied the grammar, and read CÆsar,” he faltered, “but that isn’t much. I had no teacher, and I had to work pretty hard, and it didn’t go very well.”

“I’ve had all the Latin they gave in the colleges of my time,” said Mr. Hofmyer, “if I do talk dialect; and I’ll agree with you so far as to say that it would have been a crime for me to neglect the chemistry, bacteriology, physics, engineering and other sciences that pertain to farmin’—if there’d been any such sciences when I was gettin’ my schoolin’.”

“And yet,” said Jim, “some people want us to guide ourselves by the courses of study made before these sciences existed.”

“I don’t, by hokey!” said Mr. Hofmyer. “I’ll be dag-goned if you ain’t right. I wouldn’t ’a’ said so before I heard that speech—but I say so now.”

Jim’s face lighted up at this, the first convincing evidence that he had scored.

“I b’lieve, too,” went on Mr. Hofmyer, “that your idee would please our folks. I’ve been the stand-patter in our parts—mostly on English and—say German. What d’ye say to comin’ down and teachin’ our school? We’ve got a two-room affair, and I was made a committee of one to find a teacher.”

“I—I don’t see how—” Jim stammered, all taken aback by this new breeze of recognition.

“We can’t pay much,” said Mr. Hofmyer. “You have charge of the dis-cip-line in the whole school, and teach in Number Two room. Seventy-five dollars a month. Does it appeal to ye?”

Appeal to him! Why, eighteen months ago it would have been worth crawling across the state after, and now to have it offered to him—it was stupendous. And yet, how about the Simmses, Colonel Woodruff, the Hansens and Newton Bronson, now just getting a firm start on the upward path to usefulness and real happiness? How could he leave the little, crude, puny structure on which he had been working—on which he had been merely practising—for a year, and remove to the new field? Jim was in exactly the same situation in which every able young minister of the gospel finds himself sooner or later. The Lord was calling to a broader field—but how could he be sure it was the Lord?

“I’m afraid I can’t,” said Jim Irwin, “but——”

“If you’re only ’fraid you can’t,” said Mr. Hofmyer, “think it over. I’ve got your post-office address on this program, and we’ll write you a formal offer. We may spring them figures a little. Think it over.”

“You mustn’t think,” said Jim, “that we’ve done all the things I mentioned in my talk, or that I haven’t made any mistakes or failures.”

“Your county superintendent didn’t mention any failures,” said Mr. Hofmyer.

“Did you talk with her about my work?” inquired Jim, suddenly very curious.

“M’h’m.”

“Then I don’t see why you want me,” Jim went on.

“Why?” asked Mr. Hofmyer.

“I had not supposed,” said Jim, “that she had a very high opinion of my work.”

“I didn’t ask her about that,” said Mr. Hofmyer, “though I guess she thinks well of it. I asked her what you are tryin’ to do, and what sort of a fellow you are. I was favorably impressed; but she didn’t mention any failures.”

“We haven’t succeeded in adopting a successful system of selling our cream,” said Jim. “I believe we can do it, but we haven’t.”

“Wal,” said Mr. Hofmyer, “I d’know as I’d call that a failure. The fact that you’re tryin’ of it shows you’ve got the right idees. We’ll write ye, and mebbe pay your way down to look us over. We’re a pretty good crowd, the neighbors think.”