Jed worked at carpentering for a number of years, sometimes going as far away as Ostable to obtain employment.  And then his mother was seized with the illness from which, so she said, she never recovered.  It is true that Doctor Parker, the Orham physician, declared that she had recovered, or might recover if she cared to.  Which of the pair was right does not really matter.  At all events Mrs. Winslow, whether she recovered or not, never walked abroad again.  She was “up and about,” as they say in Orham, and did some housework, after a fashion, but she never again set foot across the granite doorstep of the Winslow cottage.  Probably the poor woman’s mind was slightly affected; it is charitable to hope that it was.  It seems the only reasonable excuse for the oddity of her behavior during the last twenty years of her life, for her growing querulousness and selfishness and for the exacting slavery in which she kept her only son.

During those twenty years whatever ambition Jedidah Edgar Wilfred may once have had was thoroughly crushed.  His mother would not hear of his leaving her to find better work or to obtain promotion.  She needed him, she wailed; he was her life, her all; she should die if he left her.  Some hard-hearted townspeople, Captain Hunniwell among them, disgustedly opined that, in view of such a result, Jed should be forcibly kidnaped forthwith for the general betterment of the community.  But Jed himself never rebelled.  He cheerfully gave up his youth and early middle age to his mother and waited upon her, ran her errands, sat beside her practically every evening and read romance after romance aloud for her benefit.  And his “queerness” developed, as under such circumstances it was bound to do.

Money had to be earned and, as the invalid would not permit him to leave her to earn it, it was necessary to find ways of earning it at home.  Jed did odd jobs of carpentering and cabinet making, went fishing sometimes, worked in gardens between times, did almost anything, in fact, to bring in the needed dollars.  And when he was thirty-eight years old he made and sold his first “Cape Cod Winslow windmill,” the forerunner of the thousands to follow.  That mill, made in some of his rare idle moments and given to the child of a wealthy summer visitor, made a hit.  The child liked it and other children wanted mills just like it.  Then “grown-ups” among the summer folk took up the craze.  “Winslow mills” became the fad.  Jed built his little shop, or the first installment of it.

Mrs. Floretta Winslow died when her son was forty.  A merciful release, Captain Sam and the rest called it, but to Jed it was a stunning shock.  He had no one to take care of now except himself and he did not know what to do.  He moped about like a deserted cat.  Finally he decided that he could not live in the old house where he was born and had lived all his life.  He expressed his feelings concerning that house to his nearest friend, practically his sole confidant, Captain Sam.