prompt:
Chapter: The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and
horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty
miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
departing teacher's effects.  For the schoolhouse had been partly
furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed
by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a
cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in
which he thought of learning instrumental music.  But the enthusiasm
having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the
purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in
moving house.

The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the
sight of changes.  He did not mean to return till the evening, when
the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and
everything would be smooth again.

The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument.
The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he
should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,
the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary
lodgings just at first.

A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the
packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he
spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: "Aunt have got a
great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you've
found a place to settle in, sir."

"A proper good notion," said the blacksmith.

It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy's aunt--an
old maiden resident--and ask her if she would house the piano till
Mr. Phillotson should send for it.  The smith and the bailiff started
to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy
and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.

"Sorry I am going, Jude?" asked the latter kindly.

Tears rose into the boy's eyes, for he was not among the regular day
scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster's life,
but one who had attended the night school only during the present
teacher's term of office.  The regular scholars, if the truth must
be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic
disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.

The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr.
Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that
he was sorry.

"So am I," said Mr. Phillotson.

"Why do you go, sir?" asked the boy.

"Ah--that would be a long story.  You wouldn't understand my reasons,
Jude.  You will, perhaps, when you are older."

"I think I should now, sir."

"Well--don't speak of this everywhere.  You know what a university
is, and a university degree?  It is the necessary hallmark of a man
who wants to do anything in teaching.  My scheme, or dream, is to be
a university graduate, and then to be ordained.  By going to live at
Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak,
and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the
spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should
have elsewhere."

The smith and his companion returned.  Old Miss Fawley's fuel-house
was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give
the instrument standing-room there.  It was accordingly left in
the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for
removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.

The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine
o'clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other
_impedimenta_, and bade his friends good-bye.

"I shan't forget you, Jude," he said, smiling, as the cart moved off.
"Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read
all you can.  And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt
me out for old acquaintance' sake."

The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner
by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge
of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help
his patron and teacher in the loading.  There was a quiver in his lip
now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he
paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework,
his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child's who has felt the
pricks of life somewhat before his time.  The well into which he was
looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present
position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining
disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down.
There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the
hart's-tongue fern.

He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,
that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a
morning like this, and would never draw there any more.  "I've seen
him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I
do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!
But he was too clever to bide here any longer--a small sleepy place
like this!"

A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well.  The morning
was a little foggy, and the boy's breathing unfurled itself as
a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air.  His thoughts were
interrupted by a sudden outcry:

"Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!"

It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the
garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off.  The boy quickly
waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort
for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his
own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started
with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well
stood--nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet
of Marygreen.

It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of
an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs.  Old as it
was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local
history that remained absolutely unchanged.  Many of the thatched
and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and
many trees felled on the green.  Above all, the original church,
hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken
down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or
utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and
rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood.  In place of it
a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English
eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain
obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back
in a day.  The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to
the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level
grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated
graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses
warranted to last five years.

Slender as was Jude Fawley's frame he bore the two brimming
house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting.  Over the door
was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted
in yellow letters, "Drusilla Fawley, Baker."  Within the little lead
panes of the window--this being one of the few old houses left--were
five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow
pattern.

While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an
animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt,
the Drusilla of the sign-board, and some other villagers.  Having
seen the school-master depart, they were summing up particulars of
the event, and indulging in predictions of his future.

"And who's he?" asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy
entered.

"Well ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams.  He's my great-nephew--come since
you was last this way."  The old inhabitant who answered was a tall,
gaunt woman, who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and
gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn.  "He come
from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago--worse luck
for 'n, Belinda" (turning to the right) "where his father was living,
and was took wi' the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you
know, Caroline" (turning to the left). "It would ha' been a blessing
if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi' thy mother and father, poor
useless boy!  But I've got him here to stay with me till I can see
what's to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any
penny he can.  Just now he's a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham.
It keeps him out of mischty.  Why do ye turn away, Jude?" she
continued, as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps
upon his face, moved aside.

The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of
Miss or Mrs. Fawley's (as they called her indifferently) to have him
with her--"to kip 'ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet
the winder-shetters o' nights, and help in the bit o' baking."

Miss Fawley doubted it....  "Why didn't ye get the schoolmaster to
take 'ee to Christminster wi' un, and make a scholar of 'ee," she
continued, in frowning pleasantry.  "I'm sure he couldn't ha' took a
better one.  The boy is crazy for books, that he is.  It runs in our
family rather.  His cousin Sue is just the same--so I've heard; but
I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this
place, within these four walls, as it happened.  My niece and her
husband, after they were married, didn' get a house of their own for
some year or more; and then they only had one till--Well, I won't go
into that.  Jude, my child, don't you ever marry.  'Tisn't for the
Fawleys to take that step any more.  She, their only one, was like
a child o' my own, Belinda, till the split come!  Ah, that a little
maid should know such changes!"

Jude, finding the general attention again centering on himself, went
out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his
breakfast.  The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging
from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back he pursued a
path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the
general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-field.  This
vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr Troutham the farmer,
and he descended into the midst of it.

The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all
round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the
actual verge and accentuated the solitude.  The only marks on the
uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year's produce standing
in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and
the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he
hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family.

"How ugly it is here!" he murmured.

The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in
a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the
expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history
beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone
there really attached associations enough and to spare--echoes of
songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy
deeds.  Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last,
of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness.  Groups of
gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches
that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there
between reaping and carrying.  Under the hedge which divided the
field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers
who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest;
and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to
a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after
fulfilling them in the church adjoining.  But this neither Jude nor
the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place,
possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and
in the other that of a granary good to feed in.

The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds
used his clacker or rattle briskly.  At each clack the rooks left off
pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished
like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him
warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance.

He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart
grew sympathetic with the birds' thwarted desires.  They seemed, like
himself, to be living in a world which did not want them.  Why should
he frighten them away?  They took upon more and more the aspect of
gentle friends and pensioners--the only friends he could claim as
being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often
told him that she was not.  He ceased his rattling, and they alighted
anew.

"Poor little dears!" said Jude, aloud.  "You SHALL have some dinner--
you shall.  There is enough for us all.  Farmer Troutham can afford
to let you have some.  Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a
good meal!"

They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude
enjoyed their appetite.  A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his
own life with theirs.  Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much
resembled his own.

His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean
and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself
as their friend.  All at once he became conscious of a smart blow
upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his
surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offence
used.  The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed
eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham
himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude's cowering frame, the
clacker swinging in his hand.

"So it's 'Eat my dear birdies,' is it, young man?  'Eat, dear
birdies,' indeed!  I'll tickle your breeches, and see if you say,
'Eat, dear birdies,' again in a hurry!  And you've been idling at the
schoolmaster's too, instead of coming here, ha'n't ye, hey?  That's
how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!"

Whilst saluting Jude's ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham
had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim
frame round him at arm's-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts
with the flat side of Jude's own rattle, till the field echoed with
the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution.

"Don't 'ee, sir--please don't 'ee!" cried the whirling child, as
helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked
fish swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the
plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an
amazing circular race.  "I--I sir--only meant that--there was a good
crop in the ground--I saw 'em sow it--and the rooks could have a
little bit for dinner--and you wouldn't miss it, sir--and Mr.
Phillotson said I was to be kind to 'em--oh, oh, oh!"

This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more
than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all, and he still
smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing
to resound all across the field and as far as the ears of distant
workers--who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business
of clacking with great assiduity--and echoing from the brand-new
church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which
structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for
God and man.

Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing
the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and
gave it him in payment for his day's work, telling him to go home and
never let him see him in one of those fields again.

Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackway
weeping--not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the
perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was
good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener; but with the awful
sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year
in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for
life.

With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in the
village, and went homeward by a roundabout track behind a high hedge
and across a pasture.  Here he beheld scores of coupled earthworms
lying half their length on the surface of the damp ground, as
they always did in such weather at that time of the year.  It was
impossible to advance in regular steps without crushing some of them
at each tread.

Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not
himself bear to hurt anything.  He had never brought home a nest of
young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and
often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next
morning.  He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped,
from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up
and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his
infancy.  This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested
that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before
the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that
all was well with him again.  He carefully picked his way on tiptoe
among the earthworms, without killing a single one.

On entering the cottage he found his aunt selling a penny loaf to a
little girl, and when the customer was gone she said, "Well, how do
you come to be back here in the middle of the morning like this?"

"I'm turned away."

"What?"

"Mr. Troutham have turned me away because I let the rooks have a few
peckings of corn.  And there's my wages--the last I shall ever hae!"

He threw the sixpence tragically on the table.

"Ah!" said his aunt, suspending her breath.  And she opened upon him
a lecture on how she would now have him all the spring upon her hands
doing nothing.  "If you can't skeer birds, what can ye do?  There!
don't ye look so deedy!  Farmer Troutham is not so much better than
myself, come to that.  But 'tis as Job said, 'Now they that are
younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have
disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.'  His father was my
father's journeyman, anyhow, and I must have been a fool to let 'ee
go to work for 'n, which I shouldn't ha' done but to keep 'ee out of
mischty."

More angry with Jude for demeaning her by coming there than for
dereliction of duty, she rated him primarily from that point of view,
and only secondarily from a moral one.

"Not that you should have let the birds eat what Farmer Troutham
planted.  Of course you was wrong in that.  Jude, Jude, why didstn't
go off with that schoolmaster of thine to Christminster or somewhere?
But, oh no--poor or'nary child--there never was any sprawl on thy
side of the family, and never will be!"

"Where is this beautiful city, Aunt--this place where Mr. Phillotson
is gone to?" asked the boy, after meditating in silence.

"Lord! you ought to know where the city of Christminster is.  Near a
score of miles from here.  It is a place much too good for you ever
to have much to do with, poor boy, I'm a-thinking."

"And will Mr. Phillotson always be there?"

"How can I tell?"

"Could I go to see him?"

"Lord, no!  You didn't grow up hereabout, or you wouldn't ask such as
that.  We've never had anything to do with folk in Christminster, nor
folk in Christminster with we."

Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an
undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near
the pig-sty.  The fog had by this time become more translucent, and
the position of the sun could be seen through it.  He pulled his
straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the
plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting.  Growing up
brought responsibilities, he found.  Events did not rhyme quite as
he had thought.  Nature's logic was too horrid for him to care for.
That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another
sickened his sense of harmony.  As you got older, and felt yourself
to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its
circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized
with a sort of shuddering, he perceived.  All around you there seemed
to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares
hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped
it.

If he could only prevent himself growing up!  He did not want to be a
man.

Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up.
During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the
afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the
village.  Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay.

"Christminster?  Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I've never bin
there--not I.  I've never had any business at such a place."

The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that
field in which Jude had so disgraced himself.  There was something
unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness
of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city.  The
farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet
Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one.  So,
stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which
had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch
from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the
other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of
trees.  Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak
open down.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The schoolmaster, Mr. Phillotson, is preparing to leave the village of Marygreen in Wessex. He is bound for Christminster, where he intends to take a university degree and then be ordained. He is helped in his preparation by Jude Fawley, an eleven-year-old boy who has been his student and who admires him. Phillotson has given the boy a book as a farewell gift, and the schoolmaster tells Jude to look him up if he ever comes to Christminster. After Phillotson leaves, Jude stands thinking of the schoolmaster at the old well, to which he has come originally to draw water for his great-aunt and which is one of few old parts of the village still remaining, the rest having been replaced by more modern structures, most notably the church. Returning to the house with water from the well, Jude hears his great-aunt, Drusilla Fawley, who runs a bakery in the house, in conversation with some friends. When he enters the room, his aunt explains to her friends the circumstances of Jude's life that brought him into her care a year before. She describes him as bookish, like his cousin Sue, and tells him that he should never marry, since the Fawleys are unlucky in matrimony. Jude goes off to his job in Farmer Troutham's cornfields, where he is supposed to scare off the rooks with a noisemaker. Depressed by the ugliness of the fields and sympathetic with the birds' hunger, he soon gives up his noisemaking and happily watches the birds eat. He is caught by Troutham, reprimanded, and punished for deserting his duties, and dismissed from his job. His aunt is annoyed by his now having nothing to occupy him and wonders aloud why he didn't go off with the schoolteacher to Christminster. Jude asks her about this city but is told he'll never be able to have anything to do with it. Jude leaves, reflecting on the difficulties of growing up and the incomprehensibility of life. He decides to see Christminster and starts off, his direction necessarily taking him back through Farmer Troutham's fields.


prompt:
Chapter: Not a soul was visible on the hedgeless highway, or on either side of
it, and the white road seemed to ascend and diminish till it joined
the sky.  At the very top it was crossed at right angles by a green
"ridgeway"--the Ickneild Street and original Roman road through the
district.  This ancient track ran east and west for many miles, and
down almost to within living memory had been used for driving flocks
and herds to fairs and markets.  But it was now neglected and
overgrown.

The boy had never before strayed so far north as this from the
nestling hamlet in which he had been deposited by the carrier from a
railway station southward, one dark evening some few months earlier,
and till now he had had no suspicion that such a wide, flat,
low-lying country lay so near at hand, under the very verge of his
upland world.  The whole northern semicircle between east and west,
to a distance of forty or fifty miles, spread itself before him; a
bluer, moister atmosphere, evidently, than that he breathed up here.

Not far from the road stood a weather-beaten old barn of reddish-grey
brick and tile.  It was known as the Brown House by the people of the
locality.  He was about to pass it when he perceived a ladder against
the eaves; and the reflection that the higher he got, the further he
could see, led Jude to stand and regard it.  On the slope of the roof
two men were repairing the tiling.  He turned into the ridgeway and
drew towards the barn.

When he had wistfully watched the workmen for some time he took
courage, and ascended the ladder till he stood beside them.

"Well, my lad, and what may you want up here?"

"I wanted to know where the city of Christminster is, if you please."

"Christminster is out across there, by that clump.  You can see
it--at least you can on a clear day.  Ah, no, you can't now."

The other tiler, glad of any kind of diversion from the monotony of
his labour, had also turned to look towards the quarter designated.
"You can't often see it in weather like this," he said.  "The time
I've noticed it is when the sun is going down in a blaze of flame,
and it looks like--I don't know what."

"The heavenly Jerusalem," suggested the serious urchin.

"Ay--though I should never ha' thought of it myself.... But I can't
see no Christminster to-day."

The boy strained his eyes also; yet neither could he see the far-off
city.  He descended from the barn, and abandoning Christminster with
the versatility of his age he walked along the ridge-track, looking
for any natural objects of interest that might lie in the banks
thereabout.  When he repassed the barn to go back to Marygreen he
observed that the ladder was still in its place, but that the men had
finished their day's work and gone away.

It was waning towards evening; there was still a faint mist, but it
had cleared a little except in the damper tracts of subjacent country
and along the river-courses.  He thought again of Christminster, and
wished, since he had come two or three miles from his aunt's house
on purpose, that he could have seen for once this attractive city of
which he had been told.  But even if he waited here it was hardly
likely that the air would clear before night.  Yet he was loth to
leave the spot, for the northern expanse became lost to view on
retreating towards the village only a few hundred yards.

He ascended the ladder to have one more look at the point the men
had designated, and perched himself on the highest rung, overlying
the tiles.  He might not be able to come so far as this for many
days.  Perhaps if he prayed, the wish to see Christminster might be
forwarded.  People said that, if you prayed, things sometimes came to
you, even though they sometimes did not.  He had read in a tract that
a man who had begun to build a church, and had no money to finish
it, knelt down and prayed, and the money came in by the next post.
Another man tried the same experiment, and the money did not come;
but he found afterwards that the breeches he knelt in were made by
a wicked Jew.  This was not discouraging, and turning on the ladder
Jude knelt on the third rung, where, resting against those above it,
he prayed that the mist might rise.

He then seated himself again, and waited.  In the course of ten or
fifteen minutes the thinning mist dissolved altogether from the
northern horizon, as it had already done elsewhere, and about a
quarter of an hour before the time of sunset the westward clouds
parted, the sun's position being partially uncovered, and the beams
streaming out in visible lines between two bars of slaty cloud.  The
boy immediately looked back in the old direction.

Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of
light like the topaz gleamed.  The air increased in transparency with
the lapse of minutes, till the topaz points showed themselves to be
the vanes, windows, wet roof slates, and other shining spots upon the
spires, domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly
revealed.  It was Christminster, unquestionably; either directly
seen, or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere.

The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes lost their
shine, going out almost suddenly like extinguished candles.  The
vague city became veiled in mist.  Turning to the west, he saw that
the sun had disappeared.  The foreground of the scene had grown
funereally dark, and near objects put on the hues and shapes of
chimaeras.

He anxiously descended the ladder, and started homewards at a run,
trying not to think of giants, Herne the Hunter, Apollyon lying in
wait for Christian, or of the captain with the bleeding hole in his
forehead and the corpses round him that remutinied every night on
board the bewitched ship.  He knew that he had grown out of belief in
these horrors, yet he was glad when he saw the church tower and the
lights in the cottage windows, even though this was not the home of
his birth, and his great-aunt did not care much about him.

Inside and round about that old woman's "shop" window, with its
twenty-four little panes set in lead-work, the glass of some of
them oxidized with age, so that you could hardly see the poor penny
articles exhibited within, and forming part of a stock which a strong
man could have carried, Jude had his outer being for some long
tideless time.  But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings
were small.

Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland to the northward
he was always beholding a gorgeous city--the fancied place he had
likened to the new Jerusalem, though there was perhaps more of the
painter's imagination and less of the diamond merchant's in his
dreams thereof than in those of the Apocalyptic writer.  And the city
acquired a tangibility, a permanence, a hold on his life, mainly from
the one nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge and purposes
he had so much reverence was actually living there; not only so, but
living among the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein.

In sad wet seasons, though he knew it must rain at Christminster too,
he could hardly believe that it rained so drearily there.  Whenever
he could get away from the confines of the hamlet for an hour or two,
which was not often, he would steal off to the Brown House on the
hill and strain his eyes persistently; sometimes to be rewarded by
the sight of a dome or spire, at other times by a little smoke, which
in his estimate had some of the mysticism of incense.

Then the day came when it suddenly occurred to him that if he
ascended to the point of view after dark, or possibly went a mile or
two further, he would see the night lights of the city.  It would be
necessary to come back alone, but even that consideration did not
deter him, for he could throw a little manliness into his mood, no
doubt.

The project was duly executed.  It was not late when he arrived at
the place of outlook, only just after dusk, but a black north-east
sky, accompanied by a wind from the same quarter, made the occasion
dark enough.  He was rewarded; but what he saw was not the lamps in
rows, as he had half expected.  No individual light was visible, only
a halo or glow-fog over-arching the place against the black heavens
behind it, making the light and the city seem distant but a mile or
so.

He set himself to wonder on the exact point in the glow where the
schoolmaster might be--he who never communicated with anybody at
Marygreen now; who was as if dead to them here.  In the glow he
seemed to see Phillotson promenading at ease, like one of the forms
in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace.

He had heard that breezes travelled at the rate of ten miles an hour,
and the fact now came into his mind.  He parted his lips as he faced
the north-east, and drew in the wind as if it were a sweet liquor.

"You," he said, addressing the breeze caressingly "were in
Christminster city between one and two hours ago, floating along the
streets, pulling round the weather-cocks, touching Mr. Phillotson's
face, being breathed by him; and now you are here, breathed by
me--you, the very same."

Suddenly there came along this wind something towards him--a message
from the place--from some soul residing there, it seemed.  Surely it
was the sound of bells, the voice of the city, faint and musical,
calling to him, "We are happy here!"

He had become entirely lost to his bodily situation during this
mental leap, and only got back to it by a rough recalling.  A few
yards below the brow of the hill on which he paused a team of horses
made its appearance, having reached the place by dint of half an
hour's serpentine progress from the bottom of the immense declivity.
They had a load of coals behind them--a fuel that could only be got
into the upland by this particular route.  They were accompanied by a
carter, a second man, and a boy, who now kicked a large stone behind
one of the wheels, and allowed the panting animals to have a long
rest, while those in charge took a flagon off the load and indulged
in a drink round.

They were elderly men, and had genial voices.  Jude addressed them,
inquiring if they had come from Christminster.

"Heaven forbid, with this load!" said they.

"The place I mean is that one yonder."  He was getting so
romantically attached to Christminster that, like a young lover
alluding to his mistress, he felt bashful at mentioning its name
again.  He pointed to the light in the sky--hardly perceptible to
their older eyes.

"Yes.  There do seem a spot a bit brighter in the nor'-east than
elsewhere, though I shouldn't ha' noticed it myself, and no doubt it
med be Christminster."

Here a little book of tales which Jude had tucked up under his arm,
having brought them to read on his way hither before it grew dark,
slipped and fell into the road.  The carter eyed him while he picked
it up and straightened the leaves.

"Ah, young man," he observed, "you'd have to get your head screwed on
t'other way before you could read what they read there."

"Why?" asked the boy.

"Oh, they never look at anything that folks like we can understand,"
the carter continued, by way of passing the time.  "On'y foreign
tongues used in the days of the Tower of Babel, when no two families
spoke alike.  They read that sort of thing as fast as a night-hawk
will whir.  'Tis all learning there--nothing but learning, except
religion.  And that's learning too, for I never could understand it.
Yes, 'tis a serious-minded place.  Not but there's wenches in the
streets o' nights...  You know, I suppose, that they raise pa'sons
there like radishes in a bed?  And though it do take--how many years,
Bob?--five years to turn a lirruping hobble-de-hoy chap into a solemn
preaching man with no corrupt passions, they'll do it, if it can be
done, and polish un off like the workmen they be, and turn un out wi'
a long face, and a long black coat and waistcoat, and a religious
collar and hat, same as they used to wear in the Scriptures, so that
his own mother wouldn't know un sometimes....  There, 'tis their
business, like anybody else's."

"But how should you know"

"Now don't you interrupt, my boy.  Never interrupt your senyers.
Move the fore hoss aside, Bobby; here's som'at coming...  You must
mind that I be a-talking of the college life.  'Em lives on a lofty
level; there's no gainsaying it, though I myself med not think much
of 'em.  As we be here in our bodies on this high ground, so be they
in their minds--noble-minded men enough, no doubt--some on 'em--able
to earn hundreds by thinking out loud.  And some on 'em be strong
young fellows that can earn a'most as much in silver cups.  As for
music, there's beautiful music everywhere in Christminster.  You med
be religious, or you med not, but you can't help striking in your
homely note with the rest.  And there's a street in the place--the
main street--that ha'n't another like it in the world.  I should
think I did know a little about Christminster!"

By this time the horses had recovered breath and bent to their
collars again.  Jude, throwing a last adoring look at the distant
halo, turned and walked beside his remarkably well-informed friend,
who had no objection to telling him as they moved on more yet of
the city--its towers and halls and churches.  The waggon turned
into a cross-road, whereupon Jude thanked the carter warmly for his
information, and said he only wished he could talk half as well about
Christminster as he.

"Well, 'tis oonly what has come in my way," said the carter
unboastfully.  "I've never been there, no more than you; but I've
picked up the knowledge here and there, and you be welcome to it.
A-getting about the world as I do, and mixing with all classes of
society, one can't help hearing of things.  A friend o' mine, that
used to clane the boots at the Crozier Hotel in Christminster when he
was in his prime, why, I knowed un as well as my own brother in his
later years."

Jude continued his walk homeward alone, pondering so deeply that
he forgot to feel timid.  He suddenly grew older.  It had been the
yearning of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling
to--for some place which he could call admirable.  Should he find
that place in this city if he could get there? Would it be a spot in
which, without fear of farmers, or hindrance, or ridicule, he could
watch and wait, and set himself to some mighty undertaking like the
men of old of whom he had heard?  As the halo had been to his eyes
when gazing at it a quarter of an hour earlier, so was the spot
mentally to him as he pursued his dark way.

"It is a city of light," he said to himself.

"The tree of knowledge grows there," he added a few steps further on.

"It is a place that teachers of men spring from and go to."

"It is what you may call a castle, manned by scholarship and
religion."

After this figure he was silent a long while, till he added:

"It would just suit me."

Walking somewhat slowly by reason of his concentration, the boy--an
ancient man in some phases of thought, much younger than his years
in others--was overtaken by a light-footed pedestrian, whom,
notwithstanding the gloom, he could perceive to be wearing an
extraordinarily tall hat, a swallow-tailed coat, and a watch-chain
that danced madly and threw around scintillations of sky-light as
its owner swung along upon a pair of thin legs and noiseless boots.
Jude, beginning to feel lonely, endeavoured to keep up with him.

"Well, my man!  I'm in a hurry, so you'll have to walk pretty fast
if you keep alongside of me.  Do you know who I am?"

"Yes, I think.  Physician Vilbert?"

"Ah--I'm known everywhere, I see!  That comes of being a public
benefactor."

Vilbert was an itinerant quack-doctor, well known to the rustic
population, and absolutely unknown to anybody else, as he, indeed,
took care to be, to avoid inconvenient investigations.  Cottagers
formed his only patients, and his Wessex-wide repute was among them
alone.  His position was humbler and his field more obscure than
those of the quacks with capital and an organized system of
advertising.  He was, in fact, a survival.  The distances he
traversed on foot were enormous, and extended nearly the whole length
and breadth of Wessex.  Jude had one day seen him selling a pot of
coloured lard to an old woman as a certain cure for a bad leg, the
woman arranging to pay a guinea, in instalments of a shilling a
fortnight, for the precious salve, which, according to the physician,
could only be obtained from a particular animal which grazed on
Mount Sinai, and was to be captured only at great risk to life and
limb.  Jude, though he already had his doubts about this gentleman's
medicines, felt him to be unquestionably a travelled personage, and
one who might be a trustworthy source of information on matters not
strictly professional.

"I s'pose you've been to Christminster, Physician?"

"I have--many times," replied the long thin man.  "That's one of my
centres."

"It's a wonderful city for scholarship and religion?"

"You'd say so, my boy, if you'd seen it.  Why, the very sons of the
old women who do the washing of the colleges can talk in Latin--not
good Latin, that I admit, as a critic: dog-Latin--cat-Latin, as we
used to call it in my undergraduate days."

"And Greek?"

"Well--that's more for the men who are in training for bishops, that
they may be able to read the New Testament in the original."

"I want to learn Latin and Greek myself."

"A lofty desire.  You must get a grammar of each tongue."

"I mean to go to Christminster some day."

"Whenever you do, you say that Physician Vilbert is the only
proprietor of those celebrated pills that infallibly cure all
disorders of the alimentary system, as well as asthma and shortness
of breath.  Two and threepence a box--specially licensed by the
government stamp."

"Can you get me the grammars if I promise to say it hereabout?"

"I'll sell you mine with pleasure--those I used as a student."

"Oh, thank you, sir!" said Jude gratefully, but in gasps, for the
amazing speed of the physician's walk kept him in a dog-trot which
was giving him a stitch in the side.

"I think you'd better drop behind, my young man.  Now I'll tell you
what I'll do.  I'll get you the grammars, and give you a first
lesson, if you'll remember, at every house in the village, to
recommend Physician Vilbert's golden ointment, life-drops, and female
pills."

"Where will you be with the grammars?"

"I shall be passing here this day fortnight at precisely this hour of
five-and-twenty minutes past seven.  My movements are as truly timed
as those of the planets in their courses."

"Here I'll be to meet you," said Jude.

"With orders for my medicines?"

"Yes, Physician."

Jude then dropped behind, waited a few minutes to recover breath,
and went home with a consciousness of having struck a blow for
Christminster.

Through the intervening fortnight he ran about and smiled outwardly
at his inward thoughts, as if they were people meeting and nodding to
him--smiled with that singularly beautiful irradiation which is seen
to spread on young faces at the inception of some glorious idea, as
if a supernatural lamp were held inside their transparent natures,
giving rise to the flattering fancy that heaven lies about them then.

He honestly performed his promise to the man of many cures, in whom
he now sincerely believed, walking miles hither and thither among
the surrounding hamlets as the Physician's agent in advance.  On the
evening appointed he stood motionless on the plateau, at the place
where he had parted from Vilbert, and there awaited his approach.
The road-physician was fairly up to time; but, to the surprise of
Jude on striking into his pace, which the pedestrian did not diminish
by a single unit of force, the latter seemed hardly to recognize his
young companion, though with the lapse of the fortnight the evenings
had grown light.  Jude thought it might perhaps be owing to his
wearing another hat, and he saluted the physician with dignity.

"Well, my boy?" said the latter abstractedly.

"I've come," said Jude.

"You? who are you?  Oh yes--to be sure!  Got any orders, lad?"

"Yes."  And Jude told him the names and addresses of the cottagers
who were willing to test the virtues of the world-renowned pills and
salve.  The quack mentally registered these with great care.

"And the Latin and Greek grammars?"  Jude's voice trembled with
anxiety.

"What about them?"

"You were to bring me yours, that you used before you took your
degree."

"Ah, yes, yes!  Forgot all about it--all!  So many lives depending on
my attention, you see, my man, that I can't give so much thought as I
would like to other things."

Jude controlled himself sufficiently long to make sure of the truth;
and he repeated, in a voice of dry misery, "You haven't brought 'em!"

"No. But you must get me some more orders from sick people, and I'll
bring the grammars next time."

Jude dropped behind.  He was an unsophisticated boy, but the gift of
sudden insight which is sometimes vouchsafed to children showed him
all at once what shoddy humanity the quack was made of.  There was to
be no intellectual light from this source.  The leaves dropped from
his imaginary crown of laurel; he turned to a gate, leant against it,
and cried bitterly.

The disappointment was followed by an interval of blankness.  He
might, perhaps, have obtained grammars from Alfredston, but to do
that required money, and a knowledge of what books to order; and
though physically comfortable, he was in such absolute dependence as
to be without a farthing of his own.

At this date Mr. Phillotson sent for his pianoforte, and it gave Jude
a lead.  Why should he not write to the schoolmaster, and ask him to
be so kind as to get him the grammars in Christminster?  He might
slip a letter inside the case of the instrument, and it would be
sure to reach the desired eyes.  Why not ask him to send any old
second-hand copies, which would have the charm of being mellowed by
the university atmosphere?

To tell his aunt of his intention would be to defeat it.  It was
necessary to act alone.

After a further consideration of a few days he did act, and on the
day of the piano's departure, which happened to be his next birthday,
clandestinely placed the letter inside the packing-case, directed to
his much-admired friend, being afraid to reveal the operation to his
aunt Drusilla, lest she should discover his motive, and compel him to
abandon his scheme.

The piano was despatched, and Jude waited days and weeks, calling
every morning at the cottage post office before his great-aunt was
stirring.  At last a packet did indeed arrive at the village, and he
saw from the ends of it that it contained two thin books.  He took it
away into a lonely place, and sat down on a felled elm to open it.

Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its
possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable
sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one
language into those of another.  He concluded that a grammar of the
required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or
clue of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would
enable him, by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his
own speech into those of the foreign one.  His childish idea was, in
fact, a pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is
everywhere known as Grimm's Law--an aggrandizement of rough rules to
ideal completeness.  Thus he assumed that the words of the required
language were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the
given language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art
being furnished by the books aforesaid.

When, therefore, having noted that the packet bore the postmark of
Christminster, he cut the string, opened the volumes, and turned to
the Latin grammar, which chanced to come uppermost, he could scarcely
believe his eyes.

The book was an old one--thirty years old, soiled, scribbled
wantonly over with a strange name in every variety of enmity to the
letterpress, and marked at random with dates twenty years earlier
than his own day.  But this was not the cause of Jude's amazement.
He learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation,
as in his innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but
the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every word in both
Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the
cost of years of plodding.

Jude flung down the books, lay backward along the broad trunk of the
elm, and was an utterly miserable boy for the space of a quarter of
an hour.  As he had often done before, he pulled his hat over his
face and watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the
interstices of the straw.  This was Latin and Greek, then, was it
this grand delusion!  The charm he had supposed in store for him was
really a labour like that of Israel in Egypt.

What brains they must have in Christminster and the great schools, he
presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands!
There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the
little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he
wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another,
that he had never been born.

Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his
trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were
further advanced than those of his grammarian.  But nobody did come,
because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his
gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: At first when Jude reaches a high point outside of town, the "ridge-track," he cannot see Cbristminster; nor can he see it from the roof of a barn nearby, locally called the Brown House. He waits patiently, prays for the visibility to improve, and finally just before sunset does see light reflected from buildings in the city. Frequently thereafter he comes to this high place to look, occasionally at night. On one such occasion he encounters a man driving a wagon who talks to him about Christminster, describing it as a place of learning, religion, and beautiful music. After listening to the carter's account, all secondhand, Jude decides this is the place that may satisfy his need for a foundation. He calls Christminster "a city of light." Walking home after the occasion of his conversation with the carter, Jude encounters Physician Vilbert, a quack doctor of local reputation. After seeking confirmation of his exalted view of Christminster from the man, Jude says he wants to learn Latin and Greek and offers to advertise Vilbert's pills if the physician will get grammars of the two languages for him. The man agrees, and Jude works hard for two weeks to get orders for him. When they meet again as arranged, Jude has orders for him, the physician has forgotten the books, and the boy realizes the man has no interest in his aspirations. When Phillotson sends for the piano he has left behind, stored with Jude's aunt, Jude encloses in the packing case a request for the grammars. When they eventually arrive, Jude discovers to his dismay that there is no rule or secret by which the words of his own language can be changed into those of Latin or Greek. Appalled by the labor of learning a language word by word and amazed at what prodigious intellects the learned men of Christminster must have, Jude throws the books aside and wishes he had never seen a book and had never been born.


prompt:
Chapter: During the three or four succeeding years a quaint and singular
vehicle might have been discerned moving along the lanes and by-roads
near Marygreen, driven in a quaint and singular way.

In the course of a month or two after the receipt of the books
Jude had grown callous to the shabby trick played him by the dead
languages.  In fact, his disappointment at the nature of those
tongues had, after a while, been the means of still further
glorifying the erudition of Christminster.  To acquire languages,
departed or living in spite of such obstinacies as he now knew them
inherently to possess, was a herculean performance which gradually
led him on to a greater interest in it than in the presupposed patent
process.  The mountain-weight of material under which the ideas lay
in those dusty volumes called the classics piqued him into a dogged,
mouselike subtlety of attempt to move it piecemeal.

He had endeavoured to make his presence tolerable to his crusty
maiden aunt by assisting her to the best of his ability, and the
business of the little cottage bakery had grown in consequence.  An
aged horse with a hanging head had been purchased for eight pounds at
a sale, a creaking cart with a whity-brown tilt obtained for a few
pounds more, and in this turn-out it became Jude's business thrice a
week to carry loaves of bread to the villagers and solitary cotters
immediately round Marygreen.

The singularity aforesaid lay, after all, less in the conveyance
itself than in Jude's manner of conducting it along its route.
Its interior was the scene of most of Jude's education by "private
study."  As soon as the horse had learnt the road and the houses
at which he was to pause awhile, the boy, seated in front, would
slip the reins over his arm, ingeniously fix open, by means of a
strap attached to the tilt, the volume he was reading, spread the
dictionary on his knees, and plunge into the simpler passages from
Caesar, Virgil, or Horace, as the case might be, in his purblind
stumbling way, and with an expenditure of labour that would have made
a tender-hearted pedagogue shed tears; yet somehow getting at the
meaning of what he read, and divining rather than beholding the
spirit of the original, which often to his mind was something else
than that which he was taught to look for.

The only copies he had been able to lay hands on were old Delphin
editions, because they were superseded, and therefore cheap.  But,
bad for idle schoolboys, it did so happen that they were passably
good for him.  The hampered and lonely itinerant conscientiously
covered up the marginal readings, and used them merely on points of
construction, as he would have used a comrade or tutor who should
have happened to be passing by.  And though Jude may have had little
chance of becoming a scholar by these rough and ready means, he was
in the way of getting into the groove he wished to follow.

While he was busied with these ancient pages, which had already been
thumbed by hands possibly in the grave, digging out the thoughts
of these minds so remote yet so near, the bony old horse pursued
his rounds, and Jude would be aroused from the woes of Dido by the
stoppage of his cart and the voice of some old woman crying, "Two
to-day, baker, and I return this stale one."

He was frequently met in the lanes by pedestrians and others without
his seeing them, and by degrees the people of the neighbourhood
began to talk about his method of combining work and play (such they
considered his reading to be), which, though probably convenient
enough to himself, was not altogether a safe proceeding for other
travellers along the same roads.  There were murmurs.  Then a private
resident of an adjoining place informed the local policeman that the
baker's boy should not be allowed to read while driving, and insisted
that it was the constable's duty to catch him in the act, and
take him to the police court at Alfredston, and get him fined for
dangerous practices on the highway.  The policeman thereupon lay in
wait for Jude, and one day accosted him and cautioned him.

As Jude had to get up at three o'clock in the morning to heat the
oven, and mix and set in the bread that he distributed later in the
day, he was obliged to go to bed at night immediately after laying
the sponge; so that if he could not read his classics on the highways
he could hardly study at all.  The only thing to be done was,
therefore, to keep a sharp eye ahead and around him as well as he
could in the circumstances, and slip away his books as soon as
anybody loomed in the distance, the policeman in particular.  To do
that official justice, he did not put himself much in the way of
Jude's bread-cart, considering that in such a lonely district the
chief danger was to Jude himself, and often on seeing the white tilt
over the hedges he would move in another direction.

On a day when Fawley was getting quite advanced, being now about
sixteen, and had been stumbling through the "Carmen Saeculare," on
his way home, he found himself to be passing over the high edge of
the plateau by the Brown House.  The light had changed, and it was
the sense of this which had caused him to look up.  The sun was going
down, and the full moon was rising simultaneously behind the woods in
the opposite quarter.  His mind had become so impregnated with the
poem that, in a moment of the same impulsive emotion which years
before had caused him to kneel on the ladder, he stopped the horse,
alighted, and glancing round to see that nobody was in sight, knelt
down on the roadside bank with open book.  He turned first to the
shiny goddess, who seemed to look so softly and critically at his
doings, then to the disappearing luminary on the other hand, as he
began:

"Phoebe silvarumque potens Diana!"

The horse stood still till he had finished the hymn, which Jude
repeated under the sway of a polytheistic fancy that he would never
have thought of humouring in broad daylight.

Reaching home, he mused over his curious superstition, innate or
acquired, in doing this, and the strange forgetfulness which had led
to such a lapse from common sense and custom in one who wished, next
to being a scholar, to be a Christian divine.  It had all come of
reading heathen works exclusively.  The more he thought of it the
more convinced he was of his inconsistency.  He began to wonder
whether he could be reading quite the right books for his object
in life.  Certainly there seemed little harmony between this pagan
literature and the mediaeval colleges at Christminster, that
ecclesiastical romance in stone.

Ultimately he decided that in his sheer love of reading he had taken
up a wrong emotion for a Christian young man.  He had dabbled in
Clarke's Homer, but had never yet worked much at the New Testament
in the Greek, though he possessed a copy, obtained by post from a
second-hand bookseller.  He abandoned the now familiar Ionic for a
new dialect, and for a long time onward limited his reading almost
entirely to the Gospels and Epistles in Griesbach's text.  Moreover,
on going into Alfredston one day, he was introduced to patristic
literature by finding at the bookseller's some volumes of the
Fathers which had been left behind by an insolvent clergyman of the
neighbourhood.

As another outcome of this change of groove he visited on Sundays all
the churches within a walk, and deciphered the Latin inscriptions on
fifteenth-century brasses and tombs.  On one of these pilgrimages he
met with a hunch-backed old woman of great intelligence, who read
everything she could lay her hands on, and she told him more yet
of the romantic charms of the city of light and lore.  Thither he
resolved as firmly as ever to go.

But how live in that city?  At present he had no income at all.  He
had no trade or calling of any dignity or stability whatever on which
he could subsist while carrying out an intellectual labour which
might spread over many years.

What was most required by citizens?  Food, clothing, and shelter.
An income from any work in preparing the first would be too meagre;
for making the second he felt a distaste; the preparation of the
third requisite he inclined to.  They built in a city; therefore he
would learn to build.  He thought of his unknown uncle, his cousin
Susanna's father, an ecclesiastical worker in metal, and somehow
mediaeval art in any material was a trade for which he had rather a
fancy.  He could not go far wrong in following his uncle's footsteps,
and engaging himself awhile with the carcases that contained the
scholar souls.

As a preliminary he obtained some small blocks of freestone, metal
not being available, and suspending his studies awhile, occupied his
spare half-hours in copying the heads and capitals in his parish
church.

There was a stone-mason of a humble kind in Alfredston, and as
soon as he had found a substitute for himself in his aunt's little
business, he offered his services to this man for a trifling wage.
Here Jude had the opportunity of learning at least the rudiments of
freestone-working.  Some time later he went to a church-builder in
the same place, and under the architect's direction became handy at
restoring the dilapidated masonries of several village churches round
about.

Not forgetting that he was only following up this handicraft as
a prop to lean on while he prepared those greater engines which
he flattered himself would be better fitted for him, he yet was
interested in his pursuit on its own account.  He now had lodgings
during the week in the little town, whence he returned to Marygreen
village every Saturday evening.  And thus he reached and passed his
nineteenth year.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: During the next few years Jude tries to educate himself by reading Latin and some Greek with the use of a dictionary. This study takes place as he drives the bakery wagon for his aunt's expanding business, paying more attention to his reading than to where he is going or with whom he is supposed to do business. One day when he is sixteen he stops near the Brown House, kneels by the side of the road, and reads aloud a poem he has been reading in honor of the then setting sun and rising moon. This pagan impulse causes Jude to wonder if he as a future minister hasn't spent too much time on secular works. He then takes up the study of the New Testament in Greek and eventually theological works. In order to make possible his future move to Christminster, Jude decides he must have a trade to support himself. He chooses ecclesiastical stonework because of his interest in medieval art and also because of the fact that his cousin Sue's father had been an ecclesiastical metalworker. Apprenticing himself in the nearby town of Alfredston, he begins to learn his trade. At the age of nineteen Jude is living in the town during the week and returning to Marygreen every Saturday evening.