“Well, if you’ve come to see me, walk in, sir,” cried Squire Merritt, with a great access of heartiness, and he laid his fishing-tackle carefully on the long mahogany table in the entry, and motioned Jerome to follow him into the room on the left.

Jerome had never been inside the house before, but this room had a strangeness of its own which made him feel, when he entered, as if he had crossed the border of a foreign land.  It was typically unlike any other room in the village.  Jerome, whose tastes were as yet only imitative and departed not from the lines to which they had been born and trained, surveyed it with astonishment and some contempt.  “No carpet,” he thought, “and no haircloth sofa, and no rocking-chair!”

He stared at the skins of bear and deer which covered the floor, at the black settle with a high carven back, at a carved chest of black oak, at the smaller pelts of wolf and fox which decorated walls and chairs, at a great pair of antlers, and even a noble eagle sitting in state upon the top of a secretary.  Squire Merritt had filled this room and others with his trophies of the chase, for he had been a mighty hunter from his youth.

“Sit down, sir,” he told Jerome, a little impatiently, for he longed to be away for his fishing, and the stupid abstraction from purpose which unwonted spectacles always cause in childhood are perplexing and annoying to their elders, who cannot leave their concentration for any sight of the eyes, if they wish.

He indicated a chair, at which Jerome, suddenly brought to himself, looked dubiously, for it had a fine fox-skin over the back, and he wondered if he might sit on it or should remove it.

The Squire laughed.  “Sit down,” he ordered; “you won’t hurt the pelt.”  And then he asked, to put him at his ease, “Did you ever shoot a fox, sir?”

“No, sir.”

“Ever fire a gun?”

“No, sir.”

“Want to?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jerome did not respond with the ready eagerness which the Squire had expected.  He had suddenly resolved, in his kindness and pity towards his fatherless state, knowing well the longings of a boy, to take him out in the field and let him fire his gun, and change, if he could, that sad old look he wore, even if he fished none that day; but Jerome disappointed him in his purpose.  “He hasn’t much spirit,” he thought, and stood upon the hearth, before the open fireplace, and said no more, but waited to hear what Jerome had come for.

The Squire was far from an old man, though he seemed so to the boy.  He was scarcely middle-aged, and indeed many still called him the “young Squire,” as they had done when his father died, some fifteen years before.  He was a massively built man, standing a good six feet tall in his boots; and in his boots, thick-soled, and rusty with old mud splashes, reaching high above his knees over his buckskin breeches, Squire Eben Merritt almost always stood.  He was scarcely ever seen without them, except in the meeting-house on a Sunday—­when he went, which was not often.  There was a tradition that he in his boots, just home from a quail sortie in the swamp, had once invaded the best parlor, where his wife had her lady friends to tea, and which boasted a real Turkey carpet—­the only one in town.