r little bit of soil which he was
going to offer him, to keep a roof over his head. Why should this man
have all this, and he and his so little? Was it because he was
better? Jerome shook his head vehemently. Was it because the Lord
loved him better? Jerome looked up in the blue spring sky. The
problem of the rights of the soil of the old earth was upon the boy,
but he could not solve it--only scowl and grieve over it.

Past the length of the shining fields, well back from the road, with
a fine curve of avenue between lofty pine-trees leading up to it,
stood Doctor Prescott's house. It was much the finest one in the
village, massively built of gray stone in large irregular blocks,
veined at the junctions with white stucco; a great white pillared
piazza stretched across the front, and three flights of stone steps
led over smooth terraces to it; for it was raised on an artificial
elevation above the road-level. Jerome, having passed the last field,
reached the avenue leading to the doctor's house, and stopped a
moment. His hands and feet were cold; there was a nervous trembling
all over his little body. He remembered how once, when he was much
younger, his mother had sent him to the doctor's to have a tooth
pulled, how he stood there trembling and hesitating as now, and how
he finally took matters into his own hands. A thrill of triumph shot
over him even then, as he recalled that mad race of his away up the
road, on and on until he came to the woods, and the tying of the
offending tooth to an oak-tree by a stout cord, and the agonized but
undaunted pulling thereat until his object was gained.

"I'd 'nough sight rather go to an oak-tree to have my tooth out than
to Doctor Prescott," he had said, stoutly, being questioned on his
return; and his father and mother, being rather taken at a loss by
such defiance and disobedience, scarcely knew whether to praise or
blame.

But there was no oak-tree for this strait. Jerome, after a minute of
that blind groping and feeling, as of the whole body and soul, with
which one strives to find some other way to an end than a hard and
repugnant one, gave it up. He went up the avenue, holding his head
up, digging his toes into the pine-needles, with an air of stubborn
boyish bravado, yet all the time the nervous trembling never ceased.
However, half-way up the avenue he came into one of those warmer
currents which sometimes linger so mysteriously among trees, seeming
like a pool of air