stone wall into the first of the
three fields which separated him from his home. Across the young
springing grass went Jerome--a slender little lad moving with an
awkward rustic lope. It was the gait of the homely toiling men of the
village which his young muscles had caught, as if they had in
themselves powers of observation and assimilation. Jerome at twelve
walked as if he had held plough-shares, bent over potato hills, and
hewn wood in cedar swamps for half a century. Jerome's feet were
bare, and his red rasped ankles showed below his hitching trousers.
His poor winter shoes had quite failed him for many weeks, his blue
stockings had shown at the gaps in their sides which had torn away
from his mother's strong mending. Now the soles had gone, and his
uncle Ozias Lamb, who was a cobbler, could not put in new ones
because there was not strength enough in the uppers to hold them.
"You can't have soles in shoes any more than you can in folks,
without some body," said Ozias Lamb. It seemed as if Ozias might have
made and presented some new shoes, soles and all, to his needy
nephew, but he was very poor, and not young, and worked painfully to
make every cent count. So Jerome went barefoot after the soles parted
from his shoes; but he did not care, because it was spring and the
snow was gone. Jerome had, moreover, a curious disregard of physical
discomfort for a boy who could take such delight in sheer existence
in a sunny hollow of a rock. He had had chilblains all winter from
the snow-water which had soaked in through his broken shoes; his
heels were still red with them, but not a whimper had he made. He had
treated them doggedly himself with wood-ashes, after an old country
prescription, and said nothing, except to reply, "Doctorin'
chilblains," when his mother asked him what he was doing.

Jerome also often went hungry. He was hungry now as he loped across
the field. A young wolf that had roamed barren snow-fields all winter
might not have felt more eager for a good meal than Jerome, and he
was worse off, because he had no natural prey. But he never made a
complaint.

Had any one inquired if he were hungry, he would have flown at him as
he had done at little Lucina Merritt when she offered him her
gingerbread. He knew, and all his family knew, that the neighbors
thought they had not enough to eat, and the knowledge so stung their
pride that it made them defy the fact itself. They would not own to
each other that the