It was said that the sight of Simon Basset roused the idiot to terrific paroxysms of rage and fear, and that Basset never encountered him if he could help it.  However, poor Mindy was harmless enough to ordinary folk, sitting day after day in the barn door, looking out through the dusty shafts of sunlight, through spraying mists of rain, and often through the white weave of snow, repeating his two words, which had been dinned into his feeble brain, the Lord only knew by what cruelty and terror—­“Simon Basset, Simon Basset.”

Mindy Toggs was a terrifying object to nervous little Elmira Edwards, but Jerome used often to bid her run along, and stop himself and look at him soberly, with nothing of curiosity, but with indignant and sorrowful reflection.  At these times poor Mindy, if he had only known it, drove his old master, who had illumined his darkness of mind with one cruel flash of fear, out of house and home, and sat in his stead by his fireside in warmth and comfort.

Jerome left school finally when he was seventeen; up to that time he attended all the winter sessions.  During the winter, when Jerome was seventeen, a man came to the neighboring town of Dale, bought out the old shoe-factory and store there, and set up business on a more extensive scale, sending out work in large quantities.  Many of the older boys left school on that account, Jerome among them; he had special inducements to do so, through his uncle Ozias Lamb.

“That man that bought out Bill Dickey, over in Dale, has been talkin’ to me,” Lamb told Jerome one evening.  “Seems he’s goin’ to increase the business; he’s laid in an extra lot of stock, and hired two more cutters, and he says he don’t want to fool with so many small accounts, and he’d rather let some of it out in big lots.  Says, if I’m willin’, I can take as much as I can manage, and let it out myself for bindin’ and closin’, and he’ll pay me considerable more on a lot than Robinson has, cash down.  Now you see, J’rome, I’m gettin’ older, and I can’t do much more finishin’ than I’ve been doin’ right along.  What I’m comin’ at is this:  s’pose I set another bench in here, and take the extra work, and you quit school and go into business.  I can learn you all I know fast enough.  You can nigh about make a shoe now—­dun’no’ but you can quite.”

“I’d have to leave school,” Jerome said, soberly.

“How much more book-learnin’ do you think you need?” returned Ozias, with his hard laugh.  “Don’t you forget that all you came into this world for was to try not to get out of it through lack of nourishment, and to labor for life with the sweat of your brow.  You don’t need much eddication for that.  It ain’t with you as it was with Lawrence Prescott, who was too good to go to the district school, and had to be sent to Boston to have a minister fit him for college.  You don’t come of a liberal eddicated race.  You’ve got to work for the breath of your nostrils, and not for the breath of your mind or your soul.  You’ll find you can’t fight your lot in life, J’rome Edwards; you ain’t got standin’ room enough outside it.”