“No,” said Hector. “I’m not going to be pushed into the ministry. I’ve no mind for it at all.”

“Are you refusing to pray with your mother and me?”

“Yes,” said Hector loudly, and the dark flush spread over his face. Mr McKinnon sat down. He was only ten years older than Hector, and although he could keep up his ministerial dignity under most circumstances, he still, at times, suffered from a mortifying sense of insufficiency. Mrs Mackilwraith, who had been kneeling with her head twisted around toward them during this conversation, with an expression of maternal misery on her face, now climbed painfully to her feet and sat down again, weeping softly and unbecomingly. After a few false starts she found herself able to utter.

“It’s a mercy your father didn’t live to see this day,” she quavered. “It was his dearest wish that you should follow him in The Work.”

“I never heard him say so,” said Hector. Because he was young and fighting for his life, he gave unnecessary vehemence to his speech; his mother took this to mean that he thought that she was lying (which she was, for the Reverend John had never made any plan or expressed any wish for Hector’s future) and wept the more. For the three years past she had been romanticizing the Reverend John, and she clearly remembered his saying a good many fine things which had never, in fact, entered his mind or passed his lips.

The Reverend Mr McKinnon decided to have another try. “Hector,” said he, “it grieves me to see you being both cruel and foolish. Your mother knows what your father wished for you. She knows what she wishes for you. In a decision of this kind you must not think only of yourself. The sacrifices demanded by the ministry are numberless. But its glories, too, are numberless. To be counted among the ministers of God is to be used for the highest purpose God has designed for man. The fleshpots of this world are superficially attractive; I will confess to you that there was a period of my own life when I seemed to see the beckoning finger of pharmacy luring me toward a life of worldly ease and pleasure. But I would not retrace my steps now. Nor will you wish to do so, when once you have submitted yourself to the Will of God. His yoke is easy, and His burthen light; your father found it so, and so will you.”

“You never knew my father,” said Hector. “I don’t think anything was easy for him. And I’m telling you now that I will not be a minister. I’ll have to live my own life and make my own way, and it will not be in the church. I told you I’d made up my mind.”

“Have you no consideration whatever for your mother?”

“Yes. I’m going to support her. It is my duty, and I’ll do it. But I’ll do it as a schoolteacher.”

“I see that it is a waste of time to argue with you while you are in this frame of mind,” said Mr McKinnon. “I shall leave you with your mother, and if you have a spark of manhood in you, her tears, if not her arguments, will prevail with you.”

He left the room, and went to his bedroom, where he sat uncomfortably on the edge of his bed and thought the thoughts of a man who is not master in his own manse, and who has been worsted by a boy of seventeen.

Hector, left alone with his mother, made no attempt to comfort her. He sat for ten minutes, during which she cried softly and persistently. Then he went to her chair and put his hand on her shoulder.

“It’s no good to cry any more, mother,” said he. “You could have saved yourself all this if you had listened when I said I’d made up my mind. Now don’t worry; I’ll look after you and it’ll all come out right. I’ve planned everything.”

No more was said on the matter until the end of June, when it appeared that Hector had matriculated with honours, and he made application for a year’s training at the nearest Normal School, which was thirty miles from the village in which he had grown up.

In the autumn Hector went to the Normal School, to be trained as a teacher. He had never been away from home before but he felt no uneasiness about his situation. He had five hundred dollars, all of which he had earned himself; he had a suit for every day, which he had ordered from Eaton’s catalogue; he had a best suit which the Reverend James McKinnon had given him, it being a layman’s suit of blue which he had improvidently bought a bare six months before he donned black forever. These material possessions were not great, but they were all his own, and he had an immaterial possession which was of immeasurably greater value; he had a plan of what he meant to do during the next ten years. He had made up his mind.

When he left home no one would have thought that his mother had ever had any ambition for him save a teacher’s life. She had an ability, invaluable in a weak person, to persuade herself that whatever was inevitable had her full approval, and was in some measure her own doing. She was eager to further his plan in any way open to her.

Hector did not want money from his mother, and he did not want her to make sacrifices for him. He felt perfectly confident that he could look after himself, and her too, as soon as his year of training was over. In the years when many boys show an indecisive and unrealistic attitude toward life, Hector had grown unusually calculating and capable. The village said that he was long-headed. He had been able to detach himself from his home atmosphere enough to see that what lay at the root of many of his father’s misfortunes was a lack of foresight, of planning, of common sense. In his concerns as an errand boy and beadle, Hector found that common sense could work wonders, and that planning enabled him to get through his work with no fuss. Planning and common sense became his gods in this world.

He was too much a minister’s son to be without a god in some other world, and he was lucky enough to find the god which suited him in mathematics, represented in his schooling by algebra and geometry. In these studies, it seemed to him, planning and common sense were deified. There was no problem which would not yield to application and calm consideration. He took care to do well in all his school work, but in these subjects he exulted in a solemn, self-controlled fashion. The more difficult a problem was, the more Hector would smile his dark, shy smile, and the more cautiously would he ponder it until, neatly and indeed almost elegantly, he would pop down the solution. During his last two years of school he never failed to solve a problem correctly. When Hector went to the Normal School he possessed the secrets of life—planning and common sense. He planned that within ten years he would be a specialist teacher of mathematics in a High School, and common sense told him that he could do it as he solved problems, with proper preparation, caution and calm resolve.

Normal school yielded, almost without a hitch, to Hector’s system. He was quickly singled out by the teachers as a student of unusual ability. These teachers, it must be explained, were not so much engaged in teaching, as in teaching how to teach. It was their task to impart to the young men and women in their care the latest and most infallible method of cramming information into the heads of children. Recognizing that few teachers have that burning enthusiasm which makes a method of instruction unnecessary, they sought to provide methods which could be depended upon when enthusiasm waned, or when it burned out, or when it had never existed. They taught how to teach; they taught when to open the windows in a classroom and when to close them; they taught how much coal and wood it takes to heat a one-room rural school where the teacher is also the fireman; they taught methods of decorating classrooms for Easter, Thanksgiving, Hallowe’en and Christmas; they taught ways of teaching children with no talent for drawing how to draw; they taught how a school choir could be formed and trained where there was no instrument but a pitchpipe; they taught how to make a teacher’s chair out of a barrel, and they taught how to make hangings, somewhat resembling batik, by drawing in wax crayon on unbleached cotton, and pressing it with a hot iron. They attempted, in fact to equip their pupils in a year with skills which it had taken them many years of practical teaching, and much poring over Department manuals, to acquire. And often, after their regular hours of duty, they would ask groups of students to their homes and there, in the course of an evening’s conversation, they would drop many useful hints about how to handle rural trustees, how to deal with cranky parents, how a girl-teacher of nineteen, weighing one hundred and ten pounds, might resist the amorous advances of a male pupil of seventeen, weighing one hundred and sixty pounds, how to leave a rural classroom without making it completely obvious that you were going to the privy, and how to negotiate an increase in pay at the end of your first year. Hector absorbed all these diverse pieces of information as his natural mental nutriment. There was no question about it, he was cut out for a teacher.