mourn. Cynthia missed her father; at
times, when the winds kept her wakeful at night, she wept for him. But
she loved Jethro Bass and served him with a devotion that filled his
heart with strange ecstasies--yes, and forebodings. In all his existence
he had never known a love like this. He may have imagined it once, back
in the bright days of his youth; but the dreams of its fulfilment had
fallen far short of the exquisite touch of the reality in which he now
spent his days at home. In summer, when she sat, in the face of all the
conventions of the village, reading under the butternut tree before the
house, she would feel his eyes upon her, and the mysterious yearning in
them would startle her. Often during her lessons with Mr. Satterlee in
the parlor of the parsonage she would hear a noise outside and perceive
Jethro leaning against the pillar. Both Cynthia and Mr. Satterlee knew
that he was there, and both, by a kind of tacit agreement, ignored the
circumstance.

Cynthia, in this period, undertook Jethro's education, too. She could
have induced him to study the making of Latin verse by the mere asking.
During those days which he spent at home, and which he had grown to
value beyond price, he might have been seen seated on the ground
with his back to the butternut tree while Cynthia read aloud from the
well-worn books which had been her father's treasures, books that took
on marvels of meaning from her lips. Cynthia's powers of selection were
not remarkable at this period, and perhaps it was as well that she never
knew the effect of the various works upon the hitherto untamed soul of
her listener. Milton and Tennyson and Longfellow awoke in him by their
very music troubled and half-formed regrets; Carlyle's "Frederick the
Great" set up tumultuous imaginings; but the "Life of Jackson" (as did
the story of Napoleon long ago) stirred all that was masterful in his
blood. Unlettered as he was, Jethro had a power which often marks the
American of action--a singular grasp of the application of any sentence
or paragraph to his own life; and often, about this time, he took
away the breath of a judge or a senator by flinging at them a chunk of
Carlyle or Parton.

It was perhaps as well that Cynthia was not a woman at this time, and
that she had grown up with him, as it were. His love, indeed, was that
of a father for a daughter; but it held within it as a core the
revived love of his youth for Cynthia, her mother. Tender as were