at her the while. To
tell the truth, she found it difficult to express the emotions which the
event had summoned up.

"Thank you--Uncle Jethro," she said.

Jethro, however, understood. He had, indeed, never failed to understand
her from the beginning. He parted his coat tails and sat down on the
rock beside her, and very gently opened the book again, to the first
chapter.

"G-goin' to read it, Cynthy?"

"Oh, yes," she said, and trembled again.

"Er--read it to me?"

So Cynthia read "Robinson Crusoe" to him while the summer afternoon wore
away, and the shadows across the pool grew longer and longer.

CHAPTER XI

Thus William Wetherell became established in Coniston, and was started
at last--poor man--upon a life that was fairly tranquil. Lem Hallowell
had once covered him with blushes by unfolding a newspaper in the
store and reading an editorial beginning: "We publish today a new
and attractive feature of the Guardian, a weekly contribution from a
correspondent whose modesty is to be compared only with his genius as a
writer. We are confident that the readers of our Raper will appreciate
the letter in another column signed 'W. W.'" And from that day William
was accorded much of the deference due to a litterateur which the fates
had hitherto denied him. Indeed, during the six years which we are about
to skip over so lightly, he became a marked man in Coniston, and it was
voted in towns meeting that he be intrusted with that most important of
literary labors, the Town History of Coniston.

During this period, too, there sprang up the strangest of intimacies
between him and Jethro Bass. Surely no more dissimilar men than these
have ever been friends, and that the friendship was sometimes misjudged
was one of the clouds on William Wetherell's horizon. As the years went
on he was still unable to pay off the mortgage; and sometimes, indeed,
he could not even meet the interest, in spite of the princely sum he
received from Mr. Willard of the Guardian. This was one of the clouds on
Jethro's horizon, too, if men had but known it, and he took such moneys
as Wetherell insisted upon giving him grudgingly enough. It is needless
to say that he refrained from making use of Mr. Wetherell politically,
although no poorer vessel for political purposes was ever constructed.
It is quite as needless to say, perhaps, that Chester Perkins never got
to be Chairman of the Board of Selectmen.

After Aunt Listy died, Jethro was