lesh. She raised
herself at once, held out her trembling hands for the bowl, and drank
the gruel to the last drop. Then she gave the empty bowl to Jerome,
leaned her head back, and closed her eyes again.

After dinner Jerome changed his clothes for his poor best for the
second time, and set forth to Doctor Prescott's. Elmira's wistful
eyes followed him as he went out, but he said not a word. He threw
back his shoulders and stepped out with as much boldness of carriage
as ever.

"How smart he is!" Elmira thought, watching him from the window.

However, it was true that his heart quaked within him, supported as
he was by the advice and encouragement of Squire Merritt. Doctor
Prescott had been the awe and the terror of all his childhood. Nobody
knew how in his childish illnesses--luckily not many--he had dreaded
and resented the advent of this great man, who represented to him
absolute monarchy, if not despotism. He never demurred at his noxious
doses, but swallowed them at a gulp, with no sweet after-morsel as an
inducement, yet, strangely enough, never from actual submissiveness,
but rather from that fierce scorn and pride of utter helplessness
which can maintain a certain defiance to authority by depriving it of
that victory which comes only from opposition.

Jerome swallowed castor-oil, rhubarb, and the rest with a glare of
fierce eyes over spoon and a triumphant understanding with himself
that he took it because he chose, and not because the doctor made
him. It was odd, but Doctor Prescott seemed to have some intuition of
the boy's mental attitude, for, in spite of his ready obedience, he
had always a singular aversion to him. He was much more amenable to
pretty little Elmira, who cried pitifully whenever he entered the
house, and had always to be coaxed and threatened to make her take
medicine at all. No one would have said, and Doctor Prescott himself
would not have believed, that he, in his superior estate of age and
life, would have stooped to dislike a child like that, thus putting
him upon a certain equality of antagonism; but in truth he did.
Doctor Prescott scarcely ever knew one boy from another when he met
him upon the street, but Jerome Edwards he never mistook, though he
never stirred his stately head in response to the boy's humble bob of
courtesy. Once, after so meeting and passing the boy, he heard an
audacious note of defiance at his back, with a preliminary sniff of
scorn: "Hm! wonder if he think