l, the
minister being acquiescent, a resolution that Brother Lamb be
requested to remain quiet in the sanctuary, and not lift up his voice
unto the Lord in public unless he could do so in accordance with the
tenets of the faith, and to the spiritual edification of his
fellow-Christians. The resolution was passed, and Ozias Lamb never
entered the door of the meeting-house again, though his name was not
withdrawn from the church books.

Therefore the cuttle-fish was a sort of Circean revenge upon Doctor
Prescott and Simon Basset for his own private wrongs. It takes a god
to champion wrongs which have not touched him in his farthest
imaginings.

Chapter XV

Jerome Edwards, young as he was, had within him the noblest instinct
of a reformer--that of deducting from all evils a first lesson for
himself. He said to himself: "It is true, what Uncle Ozias says. It
is wrong, the way things are. The rich have everything--all the land,
all the good food, all the money; the poor have nothing. It is
wrong." Then he said, "If ever I am rich I will give to the poor."
This pride of good intentions, in comparison with others' deeds, gave
the boy a certain sense of superiority. Sometimes he felt as if he
could see the top of Doctor Prescott's head when he met him on the
street.

Poor Jerome had few of the natural joys and amusements of boyhood; he
was obliged to resort to his fertile and ardent imagination, or the
fibre of his spirit would have been relaxed with the melancholy of
age. While the other boys played in the present, whooping and
frisking, as free of thought as young animals, Jerome worked and
played in the future. Some air-castles he built so often that he
seemed to fairly dwell in them; some dreams he dreamed so often that
he went about always with them in his eyes. One fancy which specially
commended itself to him was the one that he was rich, that he owned
half the town, that in some manner Doctor Prescott's and Simon
Basset's acres had passed into his possession, and he could give them
away. He established all the town paupers in the doctor's clover. He
recalled old Peter Thomas from the poorhouse, and set him at Doctor
Prescott's front window in a broadcloth coat. An imbecile pauper by
the name of Mindy Toggs he established in undisturbed possession of
Simon Basset's house and lands.

Doctor Seth Prescott little dreamed when he met this small, shabby
lad, and passed him as he might have passed some way-sid