Idle dreams of boyhood! Absurd, incongruous fancies! And but for them I might at this very moment be dozing in the valley; I might be another distinguished Judge Malcolm, with my little court of ministers and squires, with old Mr. Smiley as master-of-the-horse and Miss Agnes Spinner as lady-in-waiting. Instead? I did not stay in the valley. Aroused by the sense of antagonism to Rufus Blight, and spurred on by the ambition to confront and defeat him, I began my struggle to cross the mountains, and Mr. Pound became my support and guide. He never knew the real truth behind my commendable resolution. The inspiring thought in my mind, as he insisted on judging it, was born of his own teaching. As my father had planned to live his life over again in me, so Mr. Pound saw a hope of his own intellectual immortality. Were not the evidences of grace so suddenly revealed in me the reward of his own labors?
When he came to the house, summoned in consultation over my future, he placed a hand upon my head and solemnly repeated the lines of the grand old hymn: "God works in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform." There was here a gentle hint that my past had not been altogether good or full of promise, and as Mr. Pound undoubtedly believed this, it made more generous his conduct toward me. He was a narrow man, an egotist, unlearned, too, save in the cruder forms of his calling, but he was sincere. He sought to mould me to what he thought the form a man should take, and now as I look back on the five years through which he labored with me, I may smile at the memory of his mien, his pomposity, his bigotry, yet I smile too with affection. He taught me without pay. His study became my school-room, and when at times I chafed under his vigilant tutelage and wearied in my well-doing, he steeled himself with the remembrance that Job endured more than he without complaint. In my sulkiness or open rebellion he found evidences to confirm his belief in the doctrine of innate evil; he seemed to rush singing into battle with the devil that was in me.
Through this intimate association I became a little Mr. Pound. How could it have been otherwise when day after day, books in hand, I walked down to his house to recite my lesson of Latin and Greek, and with him worked through the mysteries of algebraic calculation and studied the strange habits of the right line? He pressed me into his mould. Years went by. In the valley the Professor was forgotten, and to me Penelope was but a dim figure in the past. Even the memory of Rufus Blight ceased to awaken rancor, and I could contemplate with growing cynicism my old-time hatred of him. Unconsciously new ambitions stirred within me, and they were fostered by the flattery of my elders. In that Africa of my dream-land I no longer pictured myself in a cork helmet slaying lions, but dying at the stake, a martyr to my duty and--must I add it?--being preached about afterward from a thousand pulpits.