Section 3 (pages 37-57) Summary

This section begins with a brief reference to John's son becoming friends with a neighbor boy named Tobias, how John misses his son when he's spending the night at Tobias' home, and how much joy John feels when his son comes home unexpectedly. This leads him to recollections of his childhood friendship with Boughton, who has become an arthritically bent shadow of his former athletic self. These comments lead to John considering his own tall-for-his-age childhood, his physical presence combining with the fact that he read so much to give everyone the impression he was more mature and wiser than everyone else, an impression that lasted throughout his life. Self-deprecatingly, he comments that he never read as much as everyone thought he did, but that he did take a degree of pride in his sermons, one in particular that...