at he would have known her shadow among a nightful, her step
among a thousand. It was as if he had developed ultimate senses for
her recognition.

Jerome, when he had once glimpsed her, looked away until he was sure
that she had passed. When the bell had stopped ringing, he arose and
climbed over the stone wall, then went across a field to the path
skirting the poor-house which he had used to follow to school.

When he came opposite the poor-house in the hollow, he looked down at
it. The day was so mild that the paupers were swarming into evidence
like insects. Many of the house windows were wide open, and old heads
with palsied nods, like Chinese toys, appeared in them; some children
were tumbling about before the door.

Old Peter Thomas--who seemed to have become crystallized, as it were,
in age and decrepitude, and advanced no further in either--was
pottering around the garden, eying askant, like an old robin, the new
plough furrows. Pauper women humped their calico backs over the green
slopes of the fields, searching for dandelion greens, but not
digging, because it was Sunday.

Their shrill, plaintive voices, calling to one another, came plainly
to Jerome. When he reached the barn, there sat Mindy Toggs, as of
old, chanting his accusatory refrain, "Simon Basset, Simon Basset."

Hitherto Jerome had viewed all this humiliation of poverty from a
slight but no less real eminence of benefaction; to-day he had a
miserable sense of community with it. "It is not having what we want
that makes us all paupers," he told himself, bitterly; "I'm as much a
pauper as any of them. I'm in a worse poor-house than the town of
Upham's. I'm in the poor-house of life where the paupers are all fed
on stones."

Then suddenly, as he went on, a brave spirit of revolt seized him.
"It is wanting what we have not that makes us paupers," he said, "and
I will not be one, if I tear my heart out."

Jerome climbed another stone wall into a shrubby pasture, and went
across that to a pine wood, and thence, by devious windings and
turnings, through field and forest, to his old woodland. It was his
now; he had purchased it back from the Squire. Then he sat himself
down and looked about him out of his silence and self-absorption, and
it was as if he had come into a very workshop of nature. The hummings
of her wheels and wings were loud in his ear, the fanning of them
cool on his cheek. The wood here was very light and young, and the
spring sun