surfeited with “advantages” for which he had no use.

44

“Jennie,” said Colonel Woodruff, after the party had broken up, “I’m losing the best hand I ever had, and I’ve been sorry.”

“I’m glad he’s leaving you,” said Jennie. “He ought to do something except work in the field for wages.”

“I’ve had no idea he could make good as a teacher—and what is there in it if he does?”

“What has he lost if he doesn’t?” rejoined Jennie. “And why can’t he make good?”

“The school board’s against him, for one thing,” replied the colonel. “They’ll fire him if they get a chance. They’re the laughing-stock 45 of the country for hiring him by mistake, and they’re irritated. But after seeing him perform to-night, I wonder if he can’t make good.”

45

“If he could feel like anything but an underling he’d succeed,” said Jennie.

“That’s his heredity,” stated the colonel, whose live-stock operations were based on heredity. “Jim’s a scrub, I suppose; but he acts as if he might turn out to be a Brown Mouse.”

“What do you mean, pa,” scoffed Jennie—“a Brown Mouse!”

“A fellow in Edinburgh,” said the colonel, “crossed the Japanese waltzing mouse with the common white mouse. Jim’s pedling father was a waltzing mouse, no good except to jump from one spot to another for no good reason. Jim’s mother is an albino of a woman, with all the color washed out in one way or another. Jim ought to be a mongrel, and I’ve always considered him one. But the Edinburgh fellow every once in a while got out of his variously-colored, waltzing and albino hybrids, a brown mouse. It wasn’t a common house mouse, either, but a wild mouse unlike any he had 46 ever seen. It ran away, and bit and gnawed, and raised hob. It was what we breeders call a Mendelian segregation of genetic factors that had been in the waltzers and albinos all the time—their original wild ancestor of the woods and fields. If Jim turns out to be a Brown Mouse, he may be a bigger man than any of us. Anyhow, I’m for him.”

46

“He’ll have to be a big man to make anything out of the job of a country school-teacher,” said Jennie.

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