his kind, and, indeed, not sensing that he was dead, loved
him still, with a love as for the living, which no human being could
compass. Jerome, clinging to this dumb beast, to which alone the love
of his father had not commenced, by those cruel and insensible
gradations, to become the memory which is the fate, as inevitable as
death itself, of all love when life is past, felt for the minute all
his new strength desert him, and relapsed into childhood and clinging
grief. "You loved him, didn't you?" he whispered between his sobs.
"You loved poor father, didn't you, Peter?" And when the horse
turned his white face and looked at him, with that grave
contemplation seemingly indicative of a higher rather than a lower
intelligence, with which an animal will often watch human emotion, he
sobbed and sobbed again, and felt his heart fail him at the
realization of his father's death, and of himself, a poor child, with
the burden of a man upon his shoulders. But it was only for a few
minutes that he yielded thus, for the stature of the mind of the boy
had in reality advanced, and soon he drew himself up to it, stopped
weeping, led the horse out to the well, drew bucket after bucket of
water, and held them patiently to his plashing lips. Then a neighbor
in the next house, a half-acre away, looking across the field, called
her mother to see how much Jerome Edwards looked like his father. "It
gave me quite a turn when I see him come out, he looked so much like
his father, for all he's so small," said she. "He walked out just
like him; I declare, I didn't know but he'd come back."

Jerome, leading the horse, walked back to the barn in his father's
old tracks, with his father's old gait, reproducing the dead with the
unconscious mimicry of the living, while the two women across the
field watched him from their window. "It ain't a good sign--he's got
a hard life before him," said the older of the two, who had wild blue
eyes under a tousle of gray hair, and was held in somewhat dubious
repute because of spiritualistic tendencies.

"Guess he'll have a hard life enough, without any signs--most of us
do. He won't have to make shirts, anyhow," rejoined her daughter, who
had worn out her youth with fine stitching of linen shirts for a Jew
peddler. Then she settled back over her needle-work with a heavy
sigh, indicative of a return from the troubles of others to her own.

Jerome fed the old horse, and rubbed him down carefully. "Sha'n't be