she answered, and blushed, not knowing why. "I-I must be
going," and she gathered up the reins.

"When will you give it to me?"

"I'll stop at the tannery when I come back from Brampton," she said, and
drove on. Once she gave a fleeting glance over her shoulder, and he was
still standing where she had left him.

When she returned, in the yellow afternoon light that flowed over wood
and pasture, he came out of the tannery door. Jake Wheeler or Speedy
Bates, the journeyman tailoress, from whom little escaped, could not have
said it was by design--thought nothing, indeed, of that part of it.

"As I live!" cried Speedy from the window to Aunt Lucy Prescott in the
bed, "if Cynthy ain't givin' him a book as big as the Bible!"

Aunt Lucy hoped, first, that it was the Bible, and second, that Jethro
would read it. Aunt Lucy, and Established Church Coniston in general,
believed in snatching brands from the burning, and who so deft as Cynthia
at this kind of snatching! So Cynthia herself was a hypocrite for once,
and did not know it. At that time Jethro's sins were mostly of omission.
As far as rum was concerned, he was a creature after Aunt Lucy's own
heart, for he never touched it: true, gaunt Deacon Ira Perkins,
tithing-man, had once chided him for breaking the Sabbath--shooting at a
fox.

To return to the book. As long as he lived, Jethro looked back to the joy
of the monumental task of mastering its contents. In his mind, Napoleon
became a rough Yankee general; of the cities, villages, and fortress he
formed as accurate a picture as a resident of Venice from Marco Polo's
account of Tartary. Jethro had learned to read, after a fashion, to
write, add, multiply, and divide. He knew that George Washington and
certain barefooted companions had forced a proud Britain to her knees,
and much of the warring in the book took color from Captain Timothy
Prescott's stories of General Stark and his campaigns, heard at Jonah
Winch's store. What Paris looked like, or Berlin, or the Hospice of St.
Bernard--though imaged by a winter Coniston--troubled Jethro not at all;
the thing that stuck in his mind was that Napoleon--for a considerable
time, at least--compelled men to do his bidding. Constitutions crumble
before the Strong. Not that Jethro philosophized about constitutions.
Existing conditions presented themselves, and it occurred to him that
there were crevices in the town system, and ways into power through the
crevices for men cl