belonged to a family in which there had been little
demonstration of devotion and affection. His parents never caressed
their children; he and his sister had scarcely kissed each other
since their infancy. No matter how fervid their hearts might be, they
had also a rigidity, as of paralyzed muscles, which forbade much
expression as a shame and an affectation. Jerome had this tendency of
the New England character from inheritance and training; but now, in
spite of it, he fell down before Squire Eben Merritt, embraced his
knees, and kissed his very feet in their great boots, and then his
hand.

Squire Eben laughed, pulled the boy to his feet again, and bade him
again to cheer up and not to fret. The same impulse of kindly
protection which led him to spare the lives and limbs of old trees
was over him now towards this weak human plant.

"Come along with me," said Squire Eben, and forthwith Jerome had
followed him out of the woods into the road, and down it until they
reached his sister's, Miss Camilla Merritt's, house, not far from
Doctor Prescott's. There Squire Eben was about to part with Jerome,
with more words of reassurance, when suddenly he remembered that his
sister needed such a boy to weed her flower-beds, and had spoken to
him about procuring one for her. So he had bidden Jerome follow him;
and the boy, who would at that moment have gone over a precipice
after him, went to Miss Camilla's tea-drinking in her arbor.

When he went home, in an hour's time, he was engaged to weed Miss
Camilla's flower-garden all summer, at two shillings per week, and it
was understood that his sister could weed as well as he when his
home-work prevented his coming.

In early youth exaltation of spirit requires but slight causes; only
a soft puff of a favoring wind will send up one like a kite into the
ether. Jerome, with the prospect of two shillings per week, and that
great, kindly strength of the Squire's underlying his weakness, went
home as if he had wings on his feet.

"See that boy of poor Abel Edwards's dancin' along, when his father
ain't been dead a week!" one woman at her window said to another.

Chapter X

Squire Eben Merritt had three boon companions--the village lawyer,
Eliphalet Means; a certain John Jennings, the last of one of the
village old families, a bachelor of some fifty odd, who had wasted
his health and patrimony in riotous living, and had now settled down
to prudence and moderation, if not rep