encouraging Jerry, as my duty was, to do his tasks as they were set
before him. But I knew then what I had suspected before, that they
would never make a bond-broker of Jerry. I had but to say a word, to
give but a sign and bring about an overt rebellion. But I was too wise
to do that. I merely watched the widening circles in the pool and saw
them lost in the border of dreamland.

Jerry learned, of course, the difference between a mortgage and an
insurance policy; he knew the meaning of economics, the theory of
supply and demand, and gained a general knowledge which I couldn't
have given him of the general laws of barter and trade. But he
followed Carmichael listlessly. What did he care for bonds and
receiverships when the happy woods were at his elbow, the wild-flowers
beckoning, his bird neighbors calling? Where I had appealed to Jerry
through his imagination, Carmichael used only the formulæ of matter
and fact. There was but one way in which he could have succeeded, and
that was through the picture of the stupendous agencies of which Jerry
was to be the master: the fast-flying steamers, the monster engines on
their miles of rails, the glowing furnaces, the sweating figures in
the heat and grime of smoke and steam, the energy, the inarticulate
power, the majesty of labor which bridged oceans, felled mountains and
made animate the sullen rock. All this I saw, as one day Jerry should
see it. But I did not speak. The time was not yet. Jerry's
understanding of these things would come, but not until I had prepared
him for them.




CHAPTER IV