s way home. The weight of his
bag of stolen fruit prevented him from rising, but he would not let
go, and thereby added to his other crimes that of greediness. There
was a frontispiece representing this froward hero, in a tall hat and
little frilled trousers, with a bag the size of a slack balloon
dragging on the ground behind him, proceeding towards the neighbor's
apple-tree, which bore fruit as large as the thief's head upon its
unbending boughs.

"There's a pretty picture in it," the teacher said, when she
presented the book; she had kept Jerome after school for that
purpose. "I used to like to look at it when I was a little girl."
Then she added that she had crossed out the inscription, "Martha
Maria Whittaker, from her father, Rev. Enos Whittaker," on the
fly-leaf, and written underneath, "Jerome Edwards, from his teacher,
Martha Maria Whittaker," and displayed her little delicate scratch.

Then the teacher had hesitated a little, and colored faintly, and
looked at the boy. He seemed to this woman--meekly resigned to
old-age and maidenhood at thirty--a mere child, and like the son
which another woman might have had, but the missing of whom was a
shame to her to contemplate. Then she had said good-bye to him, and
bade him be always a good boy, and had leaned over and kissed him. It
was the kiss of a mother spiritualized by the innocent mystery and
imagination of virginity.

Jerome kept the little book always, and he never forgot the kiss nor
the teacher, who returned to her native village and taught the school
there during the summer months, and starved on the proceeds during
the winter, until she died, some ten years later, being of a delicate
habit, and finding no place of comfort in the world.

Jerome walked ten miles and back to her funeral one freezing day.

Chapter XIV

Jerome's mother never knew about the rent in his father's best coat,
nor the fight. To do the boy justice, he kept it from her, neither
because of cowardice nor deceit, but because of magnanimity. "It will
just work her all up if she knew 'Lisha Robinson made fun of father's
best coat, and it's tore," Jerome told Elmira, who nodded in entire
assent.

Elmira sat up in her cold chamber until long after midnight, and
darned the rent painfully by the light of a tallow candle. Then it
was a comparatively simple matter, when one had to deal with a woman
confined to a rocking-chair, to never give her a full view of the
mended coat-ta