ke from the white streak of the
road, which blazed beneath a cloudless sky.
The boy was tired and thirsty, and as he tramped along the perspiration
rose to his forehead and dropped, upon his shoulder. With a sigh of
satisfaction he came upon the little cottage of his father and saw his
stepmother taking the clothes in from the bushes where they had been
spread to dry. It was Saturday, and ironing day, and he hoped for a
chance at his lessons before night came, when he was so tired that the
facts would not stick in his brain. He thought that it must be very easy
to study in the mornings when you were fresh and eager and before that
leaden weight centred behind your eyeballs.
When Marthy Burr saw him she called irritably:
"I say, Nick, did they take the chickens?"
Nicholas nodded, and, crossing the weeds in the garden, gave her the
money from his pocket.
"They didn't say nothing 'bout wantin' more, I 'spose? Did you tell 'em
I was fattenin' them four pairs of ducks?"
Nicholas shook his head. No, he hadn't told them.
"Well, your pa wants you down in the peanut field. You'd better get a
drink of water first. You look powerful red."
An hour later, when work was over, he carried his book to the orchard
and flung himself down beneath the trees. The judge had given him a
biography of Jefferson, and he had learned his hero's life with lips and
heart. The day that it was finished he put the volume under his arm and
went to the rector's house.
"I want to join the church," he said bluntly.
The rector, a kindly, middle-aged man, with a love for children, turned
to him in half-puzzled, half-sympathetic inquiry.
"You are young, my child," he replied, "to be so zealous a Christian."
"'Tain't that, sir," said the boy slowly. "I don't set much store by
that. But I've got to go to heaven--because I can't see Thomas Jefferson
no other way."
The rector did not smile. He was wiser than his generation, for he left
the great man's own religion to himself and God. He said merel
Notka biograficzna
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John Addington Symonds (October 5, 1840 - April 19, 1893) was an English poet and literary critic. He was an early advocate of the validity of male love which included for him pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, and which he would refer to as lamour de limpossible.