wouldn't be
worth wages to me, and in the summer not very much. A boy that size and
age eats his head off, you might say.

"But I'll make you this offer, out of consideration of my friendship for
Peter, and your attachment for the old place, and all of that stuff:
I'll take Joe over, under writing, till he's twenty-one, at ten dollars
a month and all found, winter and summer through, and allow you to stay
right on here in the house, with a couple of acres for your chickens and
garden patch and your posies and all the things you set store on and
prize. I'll do this for you, Missis Newbolt, but I wouldn't do it for
any other human being alive."

She turned slowly to him, an expression of mingled amazement and fear on
her face.

"You mean that you want me to bind Joe out to you till he's his own
man?" said she.

"Well, some call it by that name," nodded Chase, "but it's nothing more
than any apprenticeship to any trade, except--oh, well, there ain't no
difference, except that there's few trades that equal the one the boy'll
learn under me, ma'am."

"You're askin' me to bind my little son--my only child left to me of all
that I bore--you want me to bind him out to you like a nigger slave!"

Her voice fell away to a whisper, unable to bear the horror that grew
into her words.

"Better boys than him have been bound out in this neighborhood!" said
Chase sharply. "If you don't want to do it, _don't_ do it. That's all
I've got to say. If you'd rather go to the poorhouse than see your son
in steady and honorable employment, in a good home, and learning a
business under a man that's made some success of it, that's your
lookout, not mine. But that's where you'll land the minute you set your
foot out in that road. Then the county court'll take your boy and bind
him out to somebody, and you'll have no word to say in the matter, at
all. But you can suit yourself."

"It--kind of--shook me," she muttered, the mother-love, the honor and
justice in her quailing heart shrinking back before the threat of that
terrible disgrace--the poorhouse.

The shadow of the poorhouse had stood in her way for years. It had been
the fear of Peter when he was there, and his last word was one of
thankfulness to the Almighty that he had been permitted to die in a
freeman's bed, under his own humble roof. That consolation was to be
denied her; the shadow of the poorhouse had advanced until it stood now
at her door. One step and it would envelop h