e it. There's plenty of chance for drainage from that little
stream that runs into Graystone, and it's sheltered from the frost.
Old Jonathan Hawkins owns it; we went there--his wife is sick--and he
said he used to sell berries off it, but it had run down. He said
he'd be glad to let somebody work it on shares, just allowing him for
the use of the land. He's too old to bother with it himself, and he
is pretty well straitened for money. There's money in it, I guess."

Jerome listened, and the next day went over to Jonathan Hawkins's
place, on the old Dale road, and made his bargain. Some of his work
on the cranberry-meadow was done before light, his lantern moving
about the misty expanse like a marsh candle. When the berries were
ripe he employed children to pick them, John Upham's among the rest.
He cleared quite a sum by this venture, and added it to his store. In
two years' time he had saved enough money for his mill, and early in
the fall had the lumber all ready. He had engaged one carpenter from
Dale; he thought that he could build the mill himself with his help,
and that of some extra hands for raising.

On the evening before the day on which he expected to begin work he
went to see Adoniram Judd. The Judds lived off the main road, in a
field connected with it by a cart-path. Their house, after the
commonest village pattern--a long cottage with two windows on either
side of the front door--stood closely backed up against a wood of
pines and larches. The wind was cold, and the sound of it in the
evergreens was like a far-off halloo of winter. The house had a
shadowy effect in waning moonlight, the walls were mostly gray, being
only streaked high on the sheltered sides with old white paint.

Since Paulina Maria could not afford to have a coat of new paint on
her house, she had a bitter ambition, from motives of tidiness and
pride, to at least remove all traces of the old. She felt that the
chief sting of present deprivation lay in the evidence of its
contrast with former plenty. She hated the image in her memory of her
cottage glistening with the white gloss of paint, and would have
weakened it if she could. Paulina Maria accordingly, standing on a
kitchen-chair, had scrubbed with soap and sand the old paint-streaks
as high as her long arms would reach, and had, at times, when his
rheumatism would permit, set her tall husband to the task. The paint,
which was difficult to remove by any but its natural effacers--th