Jerome, A Poor Man | Page 3

victuals for! Don't want any of your
old gingerbread!"
"It ain't old, honest," pleaded Lucina, tearfully. "It ain't old--Hannah,
she just baked it this morning." But the boy was gone, pelting hard
across the field, and all there was for the little girl to do was to go home,
with her sassafras in her pocket and her gingerbread in her hand, with
an aromatic savor on her tongue and the sting of slighted kindness in
her heart, with her cosset lamb trotting at heel, and tell her mother.
Jerome did not return to his nook in the rock. As he neared it he heard
the hollow note of a horn from the northwest.
"S'pose mother wants me," he muttered, and went on past the rock
ledge to the west, and climbed the stone wall into the first of the three
fields which separated him from his home. Across the young springing
grass went Jerome--a slender little lad moving with an awkward rustic
lope. It was the gait of the homely toiling men of the village which his
young muscles had caught, as if they had in themselves powers of
observation and assimilation. Jerome at twelve walked as if he had held

plough-shares, bent over potato hills, and hewn wood in cedar swamps
for half a century. Jerome's feet were bare, and his red rasped ankles
showed below his hitching trousers. His poor winter shoes had quite
failed him for many weeks, his blue stockings had shown at the gaps in
their sides which had torn away from his mother's strong mending.
Now the soles had gone, and his uncle Ozias Lamb, who was a cobbler,
could not put in new ones because there was not strength enough in the
uppers to hold them. "You can't have soles in shoes any more than you
can in folks, without some body," said Ozias Lamb. It seemed as if
Ozias might have made and presented some new shoes, soles and all, to
his needy nephew, but he was very poor, and not young, and worked
painfully to make every cent count. So Jerome went barefoot after the
soles parted from his shoes; but he did not care, because it was spring
and the snow was gone. Jerome had, moreover, a curious disregard of
physical discomfort for a boy who could take such delight in sheer
existence in a sunny hollow of a rock. He had had chilblains all winter
from the snow-water which had soaked in through his broken shoes; his
heels were still red with them, but not a whimper had he made. He had
treated them doggedly himself with wood-ashes, after an old country
prescription, and said nothing, except to reply, "Doctorin' chilblains,"
when his mother asked him what he was doing.
Jerome also often went hungry. He was hungry now as he loped across
the field. A young wolf that had roamed barren snow-fields all winter
might not have felt more eager for a good meal than Jerome, and he
was worse off, because he had no natural prey. But he never made a
complaint.
Had any one inquired if he were hungry, he would have flown at him as
he had done at little Lucina Merritt when she offered him her
gingerbread. He knew, and all his family knew, that the neighbors
thought they had not enough to eat, and the knowledge so stung their
pride that it made them defy the fact itself. They would not own to each
other that they were hungry; they denied it fiercely to their own craving
stomachs.
Jerome had had nothing that morning but a scanty spoonful of

corn-meal porridge, but he would have maintained stoutly that he had
eaten a good breakfast. He took another piece of sassafras from his
pocket and chewed it as he went along. After all, now the larder of
Nature was open and the lock of the frost on her cupboards was broken,
a boy would not fare so badly; he could not starve. There was sassafras
root in the swamps--plenty of it for the digging; there were young
winter-green leaves, stinging pleasantly his palate with green aromatic
juice; later there would be raspberries and blackberries and
huckleberries. There were also the mysterious cedar apples, and the
sour-sweet excrescences sometimes found on swamp bushes. These last
were the little rarities of Nature's table which a boy would come upon
by chance when berrying and snatch with delighted surprise. They
appealed to his imagination as well as to his tongue, since they
belonged not to the known fruits in his spelling-book and dictionary,
and possessed a strange sweetness of fancy and mystery beyond their
woodland savor. In a few months, too, the garden would be grown and
there would be corn and beans and potatoes. Then Jerome's lank
outlines