en
the old man had--which was seldom--a comfortable quid with which to
busy his jaws, his mind was at rest; otherwise it gnawed constantly
one bitter cud of questioning, which never reached digestion. "Why,"
asked old Peter Thomas, toiling tobaccoless in the town fields--"why
couldn't the town have give me work, an' paid me what I airned, an'
let me keep my house, instead of sendin' of me here?"

Sometimes he propounded the question, his sharp old eyes twinkling
out of a pitiful gloom of bewilderment, to the Overseer: "Say, Mr.
Simms, what ye s'pose the object of it is? Here I be, workin' jest as
hard for what's give as for what I used to airn." But he never got
any satisfaction, and his mind never relaxed to ease, until in some
way he got a bit of tobacco. Old Peter Thomas, none of whose
forebears had ever been on the town, who had had in his youth one of
the prettiest and sweetest girls in the village to wife, toiling hard
with his stiff old muscles for no gain of independence, his mind
burdened with his unanswered question, would almost at times have
sold his soul for tobacco. Nearly all he had was given him by Ozias
Lamb, who sometimes crammed a wedge of tobacco into his hand, with a
hard and furtive thrust and surly glance aloof, when he jostled him
on the road or at the village store. Old Peter used to loaf about the
store, whenever he could steal away from the poorhouse, on the chance
of Ozias and tobacco. Ozias was dearly fond of tobacco himself, but
little enough he got, with this hungry old pensioner lying in wait.
He always yielded up his little newly bought morsel of luxury to
Peter, and went home to his shoes without it; however, nobody knew.
"Don't ye speak on't," he charged Peter, and he eschewed fiercely to
himself all kindly motives in his giving, considering rather that he
was himself robbed by the great wrong of the existing order of
things.

Jerome, who had seen his uncle cram tobacco into old Peter's hand,
used sometimes to leave the path on his way to school, when he saw
the delving old figure in the ploughed field, and discovered, even at
a distance, that his jaws were still and his brow knotted, run up to
him, and proffer as a substitute for the beloved weed a generous
piece of spruce-gum. The old man always took it, and spat it out when
the boy's back was turned.

Jerome used to be fond of storing up checker-berries and sassafras
root, and doling them out to a strange small creature with wi