other people,
especially paupers and children, with a just sense of his importance.
Consequently, when he visited the poorhouse, he always spoke in the
imperative mood. It was not becoming a man of his magnificent
pretensions to speak gently and kindly to the unfortunate, the
friendless, and the forsaken; and the men and women hated him, and the
children feared him, as much as they would have feared a roaring lion.

"Boy, come here!" said Squire Walker, as he raised his arm
majestically towards a youth who was picking up "windfalls" under the
apple trees in front of the poorhouse.

The boy was dressed in a suit of blue cotton clothes, extensively, but
not very skillfully patched. At last two-thirds of the brim of his old
straw hat was gone, leaving nothing but a snarly fringe of straws to
protect his face from the heat of the sun. But this was the least of
the boy's trials. Sun or rain, heat or cold, were all the same to him,
if he only got enough to eat, and time enough to sleep.

He straightened his back when Squire Walker spoke to him, and stood
gazing with evident astonishment that the distinguished gentleman
should condescend to speak to him.

"Come here, you sir! Do you hear?" continued Squire Walker, upon whom
the boy's look of wonder and perturbation was not wholly lost.

"This way, Harry," added Mr. Nason, the keeper of the poorhouse, who
was doing the honors of the occasion to the representative of the
people of Redfield.

Harry West was evidently a modest youth, and appeared to be averse to
pushing himself irreverently into the presence of a man whom his vivid
imagination classed with Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, whose
great deeds he had read about in the spelling book.

Harry slowly sidled along till he came within about a rod of the great
man, where he paused, apparently too much overawed to proceed any
farther.

"Come here, I say," repeated Squire Walker. "Why don't you take your
hat off, and make your manners?"

Harry took his hat off, and made his manners, not very gracefully, it
is true; but considering the boy's perturbation, the squire was
graciously pleased to let his "manners" pass muster.

"How old are you, boy?" asked the overseer.

"Most twelve," replied Harry, with deference.

"High time you were put to work."

"I do work," answered Harry.

"Not much; you look as fat and lazy as one of my fat hogs."

Mr. Nason ventured to suggest that Harry was a smart, active boy,