bound at the very idea.

"Will You?" he said, looking at her eagerly. "Will you? You mean it?"

"Certainly," she answered, and blushed, not knowing why. "I-I must be
going," and she gathered up the reins.

"When will you give it to me?"

"I'll stop at the tannery when I come back from Brampton," she said, and
drove on. Once she gave a fleeting glance over her shoulder, and he was
still standing where she had left him.

When she returned, in the yellow afternoon light that flowed over wood
and pasture, he came out of the tannery door. Jake Wheeler or Speedy
Bates, the journeyman tailoress, from whom little escaped, could not
have said it was by design--thought nothing, indeed, of that part of it.

"As I live!" cried Speedy from the window to Aunt Lucy Prescott in the
bed, "if Cynthy ain't givin' him a book as big as the Bible!"

Aunt Lucy hoped, first, that it was the Bible, and second, that Jethro
would read it. Aunt Lucy, and Established Church Coniston in general,
believed in snatching brands from the burning, and who so deft as
Cynthia at this kind of snatching! So Cynthia herself was a hypocrite
for once, and did not know it. At that time Jethro's sins were mostly
of omission. As far as rum was concerned, he was a creature after
Aunt Lucy's own heart, for he never touched it: true, gaunt Deacon
Ira Perkins, tithing-man, had once chided him for breaking the
Sabbath--shooting at a fox.

To return to the book. As long as he lived, Jethro looked back to the
joy of the monumental task of mastering its contents. In his mind,
Napoleon became a rough Yankee general; of the cities, villages, and
fortress he formed as accurate a picture as a resident of Venice from
Marco Polo's account of Tartary. Jethro had learned to read, after
a fashion, to write, add, multiply, and divide. He knew that George
Washington and certain barefooted companions had forced a proud Britain
to her knees, and much of the warring in the book took color from
Captain Timothy Prescott's stories of General Stark and his campaigns,
heard at Jonah Winch's store. What Paris looked like, or Berlin, or the
Hospice of St. Bernard--though imaged by a winter Coniston--troubled
Jethro not at all; the thing that stuck in his mind was that
Napoleon--for a considerable time, at least--compelled men to do his
bidding. Constitutions crumble before the Strong. Not that Jethro
philosophized about constitutions. Existing conditions presented
themselves, and it