Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/209

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a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon, near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the southwest as the crow flies.

A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal that the school-master's plans and dreams so long indulged in had been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose—that of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls' schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go into training, since she would not marry him off-hand.

About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the school master was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to sit in his parlor during the dark winter nights and reattempt some of his old studies—one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities—an unremunerative labor for a National schoolmaster, but a subject that, after his abandonment of the University scheme, had interested him as being a com-