“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.