atched clothes
that she was almost an object of terror to children when they met her in
lonely fields and woods, bending down to the ground and searching for
herbs like an old witch. At one time, also, she went in great haste to a
lawyer in the village, and with his assistance raised three thousand
dollars on a mortgage on her house, mortgaging it very nearly to its full
value. In vain he represented to her that, in case the house should chance
to stand empty for a year, she would have no money to pay the interest on
her mortgage, and would lose the property. She either could not
understand, or did not care for what he said. The house always had brought
her in about so many dollars a year; she believed it always would; at any
rate, she wanted this money. And so it came to pass that the mortgage on
the old Jacobs house had come into Stephen White's hands, and he was now
living in one half of it, his own tenant and landlord at once, as he often
laughingly said.

These old rumors and sayings about the Jacobs's family history were
running in Stephen's head this evening, as he stood listlessly leaning on
the gate, and looking down at the unsightly spot of bare earth still left
where the gate had so long stood pressed back against the fence.

"I wonder how long it'll take to get that old rut smooth and green like
the rest of the yard," he thought. Stephen White absolutely hated
ugliness. It did not merely irritate and depress him, as it does everybody
of fine fastidiousness: he hated not only the sight of it, he hated it
with a sort of unreasoning vindictiveness. If it were a picture, he wanted
to burn the picture, cut it, tear it, trample it under foot, get it off
the face of the earth immediately, at any cost or risk. It had no business
to exist: if nobody else would make way with it, he must. He often saw
places that he would have liked to devastate, to blot out of existence if
he could, just because they were barren and unsightly. Once, when he was a
very little child, he suddenly seized a book of his father's,--an old,
shabby, worn dictionary,--and flung it into the fire with uncontrollable
passion; and, on being asked why he did it, had nothing to say in
justification of his act, except this extraordinary statement: "It was an
ugly book; it hurt me. Ugly books ought to go in the fire." What the child
suffered, and, still more, what the man suffered from this hatred of
ugliness, no words could portray. Ever since he coul