Doctor Seth Prescott little dreamed when he met this small, shabby lad, and passed him as he might have passed some way-side weed, what was in his mind.  If people, when they meet, could know half the workings of one another’s minds, the recoils from the shocks might overbalance creation.  But Doctor Prescott never saw the phantom paupers slouching through his clover-fields, and Simon Basset never jostled Mindy Toggs on his threshold.  However, Mindy Toggs had once lived in Simon Basset’s house.

As Jerome advanced through boyhood it seemed as if everything combined to strengthen, by outside example, the fancies and beliefs derived from Ozias Lamb’s precepts and his own constantly hard and toilsome life.  Jerome, on his very way to the district school, learned tasks of bitter realism more impressive to his peculiar order of mind than the tables and columns in the text-books.

There was a short cut across the fields between the school-house and the Edwards house.  Jerome and Elmira usually took it, unless the snow was deep, as by doing so they lessened the distance considerably.

The Edwards house was situated upon a road crossing the main highway of the village where the school-house stood.  In the triangle of fields between the path which the Edwards children followed on their way to school and the two roads was the poorhouse.  It was a low, stone-basemented structure, with tiny windows, a few of them barred with iron, retreating ignominiously within thick walls; the very grovelling of mendicancy seemed symbolized in its architecture by some unpremeditatedness of art.  It stood in a hollow, amid slopes of stony plough ridges, over which the old male paupers swarmed painfully with spades and shovels when spring advanced.  When spring came, too, old pauper women and wretched, half-witted girls and children squatted like toads in the green fields outside the ploughed ones, digging greens in company with grazing cows, and looked up with unexpected flashes of human life when footsteps drew near.  There was a thrifty Overseer in the poorhouse, and the village paupers, unless they were actually crippled and past labor, found small repose in the bosom of the town.  They grubbed as hard for their lodging and daily bread of charity, with its bitterest of sauces, as if they worked for hire.

Old Peter Thomas, for one, had never toiled harder to keep the roof of independence over his head than he toiled tilling the town fields.  Old Peter, even in his age and indigence, had an active mind.  Only one panacea was there for its workings, and that was tobacco.  When the old man had—­which was seldom—­a comfortable quid with which to busy his jaws, his mind was at rest; otherwise it gnawed constantly one bitter cud of questioning, which never reached digestion.  “Why,” asked old Peter Thomas, toiling tobaccoless in the town fields—­“why couldn’t the town have give me work, an’ paid me what I airned, an’ let me keep my house, instead of sendin’ of me here?”