f a
peace he had never known before. There came no newspapers to the tannery
house now: during the mid-week he read the books of which she had spoken
William Wetherell's books; or sat in thought, counting, perhaps; the days
until she should come again. And the boy of those days for him was more
pathetic than much that is known to the world as sorrow.

And what did Coniston think? Coniston, indeed, knew not what to think,
when, little by little, the great men ceased to drive up to the door of
the tannery house, and presently came no more. Coniston sank then from
its proud position as the real capital of the state to a lonely hamlet
among the hills. Coniston, too, was watching the drama, and had had a
better view of the stage than Brampton, and saw some reason presently for
the change in Jethro Bass. Not that Mr. Satterlee told, but such evidence
was bound, in the end, to speak for itself. The Newcastle Guardian had
been read and debated at the store--debated with some heat by Chester
Perkins and other mortgagors; discussed, nevertheless, in a political
rather than a moral light. Then Cynthia had returned home; her face had
awed them by its sorrow, and she had begun to earn her own living. Then
the politicians had ceased to come. The credit belongs to Rias Richardson
for hawing been the first to piece these three facts together, causing
him to burn his hand so severely on the stove that he had to carry it
bandaged in soda for a week. Cynthia Wetherell had reformed Jethro.

Though the village loved and revered Cynthia, Coniston as a whole did not
rejoice in that reform. The town had fallen from its mighty estate, and
there were certain envious ones who whispered that it had remained for a
young girl who had learned city ways to twist Jethro around her finger;
that she had made him abandon his fight with Isaac D. Worthington because
Mr. Worthington had a son--but there is no use writing such scandal.
Stripped of his power--even though he stripped himself--Jethro began to
lose their respect, a trait tending to prove that the human race may have
had wolves for ancestors as well as apes. People had small opportunity,
however, of showing a lack of respect to his person, for in these days he
noticed no one and spoke to none.

When the lion is crippled, the jackals begin to range. A jackal
reconnoitered the lair to see how badly the lion was crippled, and
conceived with astounding insolence the plan of capturing the lion's
quar