And one good effect of his giving his heart to the hope was, that he could hold from speculating and from feeling, even from pausing to wonder at the most wonderful turn of events.

Blessed antagonism drove him to be braced by thoughts upon the hardest of the schoolmaster's tasks--bright winter thoughts, prescribing to him satisfaction with a faith in the sowing, which may be his only reaping.
Away fly the boys in sheaves.

After his toil with them, to instruct, restrain, animate, point their minds, they leave him, they plunge into the world and are gone.

Will he see them again?
It is a flickering perhaps.

To sustain his belief that he has done serviceable work, he must be sore of his having charged them with good matter.