itself. Through that came now and then
great whiffs of perfume from some unseen flowering bush, calling, as
it were, from its obscurity, with halloos of fragrance, to the
careless passer-by, to search it out.

Jerome passed along, seeing and comprehending all the sweet pageant
of the spring morning, yet as an observer merely. Nature had as yet
not established her fullest relationship to himself, and he knew not
that her secret glory of meaning was like his own.

Chapter XXI

John Upham's farm, or rather what had been John Upham's farm (Doctor
Prescott owned it now), began at the end of a long stretch of woods,
with some fine fields sloping greenly towards the west. Farther on,
behind a row of feathery elm-trees, stood the old Upham homestead.

John Upham did not live there now; his mortgage had been foreclosed
nearly a year before, about the time the last baby was born. People
said that the mother had been cruelly hurried out of her own house
into the little shanty, which her husband was forced to rent for a
shelter. Poor John Upham had lost all his ancestral acres to Doctor
Prescott now, and did not fairly know himself how it had happened.
There had been heavy bills for medicines and attendance, and the
doctor had loaned him money oftentimes, with his land as security,
for other debts. A little innocent saying of one of his six children
to another was much repeated to the village, "Father bought you of
Doctor Prescott, and paid for you with all the clover-field he had
left, and you must be very good, for you came very dear."

It was known positively that John Upham had gone to Doctor Prescott's
the day after he had left his old home, and told him to his face what
he thought of him. "You have planned and manoeuvred to get all my
property into your hands from the very first of it," said John Upham.
"You've drained me dry, an' now I hope you're satisfied."

"You had full value in return," replied the doctor, calmly.

"I haven't had time. In nine cases out of ten, if you had given me a
little time, I could have got myself out, and you know it. You've
screwed me down to the very second."

"I cannot afford to give my debtors longer time than that regulated
by the laws of the commonwealth."

Then a sudden strange gleam had come into John Upham's blue eyes.
"Thank the Lord," he cried out, in a trembling fervor of
wrath--"thank the Lord, He gives all the time there is to His
debtors, an' no commonwealth on th