y were hungry; they denied it fiercely to their
own craving stomachs.

Jerome had had nothing that morning but a scanty spoonful of
corn-meal porridge, but he would have maintained stoutly that he had
eaten a good breakfast. He took another piece of sassafras from his
pocket and chewed it as he went along. After all, now the larder of
Nature was open and the lock of the frost on her cupboards was
broken, a boy would not fare so badly; he could not starve. There was
sassafras root in the swamps--plenty of it for the digging; there
were young winter-green leaves, stinging pleasantly his palate with
green aromatic juice; later there would be raspberries and
blackberries and huckleberries. There were also the mysterious cedar
apples, and the sour-sweet excrescences sometimes found on swamp
bushes. These last were the little rarities of Nature's table which a
boy would come upon by chance when berrying and snatch with delighted
surprise. They appealed to his imagination as well as to his tongue,
since they belonged not to the known fruits in his spelling-book and
dictionary, and possessed a strange sweetness of fancy and mystery
beyond their woodland savor. In a few months, too, the garden would
be grown and there would be corn and beans and potatoes. Then
Jerome's lank outlines would begin to take on curves and the hungry
look would disappear from his face. He was a handsome boy, with a
fearless outlook of black eyes from his lean, delicate face, and a
thick curling crop of fair hair which the sun had bleached like
straw. Always protected from the weather, Jerome's hair would have
been brown; but his hats failed him like his shoes, and often in the
summer season were crownless. However, his mother mended them as long
as she was able. She was a thrifty woman, although she was a
semi-invalid, and sat all day long in a high-backed rocking-chair.
She was not young either; she had been old when she married and her
children were born, but there was a strange element of toughness in
her--a fibre either of body or spirit that kept her in being, like
the fibre of an old tree.

Before Jerome entered the house his mother's voice saluted him.
"Where have you been, Jerome Edwards?" she demanded. Her voice was
querulous, but strongly shrill. It could penetrate every wall and
door. Ann Edwards, as she sat in her rocking-chair, lifted up her
voice, and it sounded all over her house like a trumpet, and all her
household marched to it.