o leaning against the pillar. Both Cynthia and Mr. Satterlee knew
that he was there, and both, by a kind of tacit agreement, ignored the
circumstance.

Cynthia, in this period, undertook Jethro's education, too. She could
have induced him to study the making of Latin verse by the mere asking.
During those days which he spent at home, and which he had grown to value
beyond price, he might have been seen seated on the ground with his back
to the butternut tree while Cynthia read aloud from the well-worn books
which had been her father's treasures, books that took on marvels of
meaning from her lips. Cynthia's powers of selection were not remarkable
at this period, and perhaps it was as well that she never knew the effect
of the various works upon the hitherto untamed soul of her listener.
Milton and Tennyson and Longfellow awoke in him by their very music
troubled and half-formed regrets; Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" set up
tumultuous imaginings; but the "Life of Jackson" (as did the story of
Napoleon long ago) stirred all that was masterful in his blood.
Unlettered as he was, Jethro had a power which often marks the American
of action--a singular grasp of the application of any sentence or
paragraph to his own life; and often, about this time, he took away the
breath of a judge or a senator by flinging at them a chunk of Carlyle or
Parton.

It was perhaps as well that Cynthia was not a woman at this time, and
that she had grown up with him, as it were. His love, indeed, was that of
a father for a daughter; but it held within it as a core the revived love
of his youth for Cynthia, her mother. Tender as were the manifestations
of this love, Cynthia never guessed the fires within, for there was in
truth something primeval in the fierceness of his passion. She was his
now--his alone, to cherish and sweeten the declining years of his life,
and when by a chance Jethro looked upon her and thought of the suitor who
was to come in the fulness of her years, he burned with a hatred which it
is given few men to feel. It was well for Jethro that these thoughts came
not often.

Sometimes, in the summer afternoons, they took long drives through the
town behind Jethro's white horse on business. "Jethro's gal," as Cynthia
came to be affectionately called, held the reins while Jethro went in to
talk to the men folk. One August evening found Cynthia thus beside a
poplar in front of Amos Cuthbert's farmhouse, a poplar that shimmered
g