The other discovery was of a small hoard of coin.  Under one of the boards which formed the imperfect flooring of the garret was hidden an old leather mitten.  Instead of a hand, it had a fat fist of silver dollars, and a thumb of gold half-eagles.

Thus knowledge and power found their way to the simple and secluded maiden.  The books were hers to read as much as any other’s; the gold and silver were only a part of that small provision which would be hers by and by, and if she borrowed it, it was borrowing of herself.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil had shaken its fruit into her lap, and, without any serpent to tempt her, she took thereof and did eat.

CHAPTER IV.

Byles Gridley, A. M.

The old Master of Arts was as notable a man in his outside presentment as one will find among five hundred college alumni as they file in procession.  His strong, squared features, his formidable scowl, his solid-looking head, his iron-gray hair, his positive and as it were categorical stride, his slow, precise way of putting a statement, the strange union of trampling radicalism in some directions and high-stepping conservatism in others, which made it impossible to calculate on his unexpressed opinions, his testy ways and his generous impulses, his hard judgments and kindly actions, were characteristics that gave him a very decided individuality.

He had all the aspects of a man of books.  His study, which was the best room in Mrs. Hopkins’s house, was filled with a miscellaneous-looking collection of volumes, which his curious literary taste had got together from the shelves of all the libraries that had been broken up during his long life as a scholar.  Classics, theology, especially of the controversial sort, statistics, politics, law, medicine, science, occult and overt, general literature,—­almost every branch of knowledge was represented.  His learning was very various, and of course mixed up, useful and useless, new and ancient, dogmatic and rational,—­like his library, in short; for a library gathered like his is a looking-glass in which the owner’s mind is reflected.

The common people about the village did not know what to make of such a phenomenon.  He did not preach, marry, christen, or bury, like the ministers, nor jog around with medicines for sick folks, nor carry cases into court for quarrelsome neighbors.  What was he good for?  Not a great deal, some of the wiseacres thought,—­had “all sorts of sense but common sense,”—­“smart mahn, but not prahctical.”  There were others who read him more shrewdly.  He knowed more, they said, than all the ministers put together, and if he’d stan’ for Ripresentative they ’d like to vote for him,—­they hed n’t hed a smart mahn in the Gineral Court sence Squire Wibird was thar.

They may have overdone the matter in comparing his knowledge with that of all the ministers together, for Priest Pemberton was a real scholar in his special line of study,—­as all D. D.’s are supposed to be, or they would not have been honored with that distinguished title.  But Mr. Byles Gridley not only had more learning than the deep-sea line of the bucolic intelligence could fathom; he had more wisdom also than they gave him credit for, even those among them who thought most of his abilities.