“And I don’t want to hire, so we sha’n’t quarrel about that,” Jerome replied, shortly.

“I don’t say that I wouldn’t let ye have a little money, if you needed it, an’ it was for somethin’ safe for both of us,” said Cheeseman, uneasily, “but, as I said before, I don’t believe in temptin’ of Providence, especially when it seems set agin you.”

“I am not going to shirk any blame off on to Providence,” Jerome responded, scornfully.  “It was Stimson’s weak dam up above.”

“Mebbe the dam was weak, but Providence took advantage of it,” insisted Cheeseman, who, in spite of his cheerful temperament, had a gloomy theology.  “I’d like to know why ye think your mill went down; do ye think ye done anything to deserve it?” he said, further, in an argumentative tone.

“If I thought I had, I’d do it again,” Jerome returned, and went off to a distant pile of lumber out of sound of Cheeseman’s voice.

He felt a proud sensitiveness, almost a shame, over his calamity, which he would have been at a loss to explain.  All day long, when men came to view the scene of disaster, he tried to avoid them.  He shrank in spirit even from their sympathy.

“No worse for me than for anybody else,” he would reply, when told repeatedly, with gruff condolence, that it was hard luck.  His sensitiveness might have arisen from some hereditary taint from his orthodox ancestors of their belief that misfortune is the whip-lash for sin, or from his native resentment of pity.  At home he could not talk of it either with his mother or Elmira; as for his father, he sat in the sun and dozed.  It was doubtful if he fully realized what had happened.

Jerome worked in the woods that day until after dark; when he went home he found that the Squire had been there with a request for him to be one of the bearers at the Colonel’s funeral.  That was considered a post of melancholy honor, and his mother looked sadly important over it.

“I s’pose as long as the poor Colonel is gone himself, an’ there’s only three left that he used to be so intimate with, that they thought you would be a good one,” said she.

“It is strange they did not ask some one nearer his age,” Jerome said, wonderingly.

The funeral was appointed for the next afternoon.  Jerome sat in the parlor of the Means house with the mourners, who were few, as the dead man had no kin in Upham.  Indeed, there was nobody except his three old friends, his house-keeper, and Abigail Merritt and Lucina.

Jerome did not look at Lucina, nor she at him; as the service went on, he heard her weeping softly.  The minister, Solomon Wells, standing near the black length of the coffin, lifted his voice in eulogy of the dead.  The parlor door-way and that of the room beyond, were set with faces straining with attention.