Sometimes he propounded the question, his sharp old eyes twinkling out of a pitiful gloom of bewilderment, to the Overseer:  “Say, Mr. Simms, what ye s’pose the object of it is?  Here I be, workin’ jest as hard for what’s give as for what I used to airn.”  But he never got any satisfaction, and his mind never relaxed to ease, until in some way he got a bit of tobacco.  Old Peter Thomas, none of whose forebears had ever been on the town, who had had in his youth one of the prettiest and sweetest girls in the village to wife, toiling hard with his stiff old muscles for no gain of independence, his mind burdened with his unanswered question, would almost at times have sold his soul for tobacco.  Nearly all he had was given him by Ozias Lamb, who sometimes crammed a wedge of tobacco into his hand, with a hard and furtive thrust and surly glance aloof, when he jostled him on the road or at the village store.  Old Peter used to loaf about the store, whenever he could steal away from the poorhouse, on the chance of Ozias and tobacco.  Ozias was dearly fond of tobacco himself, but little enough he got, with this hungry old pensioner lying in wait.  He always yielded up his little newly bought morsel of luxury to Peter, and went home to his shoes without it; however, nobody knew.  “Don’t ye speak on’t,” he charged Peter, and he eschewed fiercely to himself all kindly motives in his giving, considering rather that he was himself robbed by the great wrong of the existing order of things.

Jerome, who had seen his uncle cram tobacco into old Peter’s hand, used sometimes to leave the path on his way to school, when he saw the delving old figure in the ploughed field, and discovered, even at a distance, that his jaws were still and his brow knotted, run up to him, and proffer as a substitute for the beloved weed a generous piece of spruce-gum.  The old man always took it, and spat it out when the boy’s back was turned.

Jerome used to be fond of storing up checker-berries and sassafras root, and doling them out to a strange small creature with wild, askant eyes and vaguely smiling mouth, with white locks blowing as straightly and coarsely as dry swamp grass, who was wont to sit, huddling sharp little elbows and knees together, even in severe weather, on a stone by the path.  She had come into the world and the poorhouse by the shunned byway of creation.  She had no name.  The younger school-children said, gravely, and believed it, that she had never had a father; as for her mother, she was only a barely admitted and shameful necessity, who had come from unknown depths, and died of a decline, at the town’s expense, before the child could walk.  She had nothing save this disgraceful shadow of maternity, her feeble little body, and her little soul, and a certain half-scared delight in watching for Jerome and his doles of berries and sassafras.  One of Jerome’s dearest dreams was the buying this child a doll like Lucina Merritt’s, with a muslin frock and gay sash and morocco shoes.