astor-ile
down your throat out of a quart measure, arter the blue-pills and the
assafoetidy."

"I'd like to see him! He is a wicked man. Let me go!"

"Don't you go to callin' names that nobody but the Almighty has any
right to fasten on to folks."

"Let me go!" Jerome wriggled under the man's detaining grasp, as
wirily instinct with nerves as a cat; he kicked out viciously at his
shins.

"Lord! I'd as lief try to hold a catamount," cried Jake Noyes,
laughing, and released him, and Jerome raced out of the yard.

It was then about two o'clock. He should have gone home to his
planting, but his childish patience was all gone. Poor little Jack
had been worsted by the giant, and his bean-garden might as well be
neglected. Human strength may endure heavy disappointments and
calamities with heroism, but it requires superhuman power to hold
one's hand to the grindstone of petty duties and details of life in
the midst of them. Jerome had faced his rebuff without a whimper, and
with a great stand of spirit, but now he could not go home and work
in the garden, and tie his fiery revolt to the earth with spade and
hoe. He ran on up the road, until he passed the village and came to
his woodland. He followed the cart path through it, until he was near
the boundary wall; then he threw himself down in the midst of some
young brakes and little wild green things, and presently fell to
weeping, with loud sobs, like a baby.

All day he had been strained up to an artificial height of manhood;
now he had come down again to his helpless estate of boyhood. In the
solitude of the woods there is no mocking, and no despite for
helplessness and grief. The trees raising their heads in a great host
athwart the sky, the tender plants beneath gathering into their old
places with tumultuous silence, put to shame no outcry of any
suffering heart of bird or beast or man. To these unpruned and
mother-fastnesses of the earth belonged at first the wailing infancy
of all life, and even now a vague memory of it is left, like the
organ of a lost sense, in the heart oppressed by the grief of the
grown world.

The boy unknowingly had fled to his first mother, who had soothed his
old sorrow in his heart before he had come into the consciousness of
it. Had Doctor Prescott at any minute surprised him, he would have
faced him again, with no sign of weakening; but he lay there, curled
up among the brakes as in a green nest, with his face against the
earth,