Jerome had had nothing that morning but a scanty spoonful of corn-meal porridge, but he would have maintained stoutly that he had eaten a good breakfast.  He took another piece of sassafras from his pocket and chewed it as he went along.  After all, now the larder of Nature was open and the lock of the frost on her cupboards was broken, a boy would not fare so badly; he could not starve.  There was sassafras root in the swamps—­plenty of it for the digging; there were young winter-green leaves, stinging pleasantly his palate with green aromatic juice; later there would be raspberries and blackberries and huckleberries.  There were also the mysterious cedar apples, and the sour-sweet excrescences sometimes found on swamp bushes.  These last were the little rarities of Nature’s table which a boy would come upon by chance when berrying and snatch with delighted surprise.  They appealed to his imagination as well as to his tongue, since they belonged not to the known fruits in his spelling-book and dictionary, and possessed a strange sweetness of fancy and mystery beyond their woodland savor.  In a few months, too, the garden would be grown and there would be corn and beans and potatoes.  Then Jerome’s lank outlines would begin to take on curves and the hungry look would disappear from his face.  He was a handsome boy, with a fearless outlook of black eyes from his lean, delicate face, and a thick curling crop of fair hair which the sun had bleached like straw.  Always protected from the weather, Jerome’s hair would have been brown; but his hats failed him like his shoes, and often in the summer season were crownless.  However, his mother mended them as long as she was able.  She was a thrifty woman, although she was a semi-invalid, and sat all day long in a high-backed rocking-chair.  She was not young either; she had been old when she married and her children were born, but there was a strange element of toughness in her—­a fibre either of body or spirit that kept her in being, like the fibre of an old tree.

Before Jerome entered the house his mother’s voice saluted him.  “Where have you been, Jerome Edwards?” she demanded.  Her voice was querulous, but strongly shrill.  It could penetrate every wall and door.  Ann Edwards, as she sat in her rocking-chair, lifted up her voice, and it sounded all over her house like a trumpet, and all her household marched to it.

“Been over in the pasture,” answered Jerome, with quick and yet rather defiant obedience, as he opened the door.

His mother’s face, curiously triangular in outline, like a cat’s, with great hollow black eyes between thin parted curtains of black false hair, confronted him when he entered the room.  She always sat face to the door and window, and not a soul who passed or entered escaped her for a minute.  “What have you been doing in the pasture?” said she.

“Sittin’.”

“Sittin’?”