e weed, what
was in his mind. If people, when they meet, could know half the
workings of one another's minds, the recoils from the shocks might
overbalance creation. But Doctor Prescott never saw the phantom
paupers slouching through his clover-fields, and Simon Basset never
jostled Mindy Toggs on his threshold. However, Mindy Toggs had once
lived in Simon Basset's house.

As Jerome advanced through boyhood it seemed as if everything
combined to strengthen, by outside example, the fancies and beliefs
derived from Ozias Lamb's precepts and his own constantly hard and
toilsome life. Jerome, on his very way to the district school,
learned tasks of bitter realism more impressive to his peculiar order
of mind than the tables and columns in the text-books.

There was a short cut across the fields between the school-house and
the Edwards house. Jerome and Elmira usually took it, unless the snow
was deep, as by doing so they lessened the distance considerably.

The Edwards house was situated upon a road crossing the main highway
of the village where the school-house stood. In the triangle of
fields between the path which the Edwards children followed on their
way to school and the two roads was the poorhouse. It was a low,
stone-basemented structure, with tiny windows, a few of them barred
with iron, retreating ignominiously within thick walls; the very
grovelling of mendicancy seemed symbolized in its architecture by
some unpremeditatedness of art. It stood in a hollow, amid slopes of
stony plough ridges, over which the old male paupers swarmed
painfully with spades and shovels when spring advanced. When spring
came, too, old pauper women and wretched, half-witted girls and
children squatted like toads in the green fields outside the ploughed
ones, digging greens in company with grazing cows, and looked up with
unexpected flashes of human life when footsteps drew near. There was
a thrifty Overseer in the poorhouse, and the village paupers, unless
they were actually crippled and past labor, found small repose in the
bosom of the town. They grubbed as hard for their lodging and daily
bread of charity, with its bitterest of sauces, as if they worked for
hire.

Old Peter Thomas, for one, had never toiled harder to keep the roof
of independence over his head than he toiled tilling the town fields.
Old Peter, even in his age and indigence, had an active mind. Only
one panacea was there for its workings, and that was tobacco. Wh