Cynthia would have liked to reprove Jock Hallowell, and tell him there were some subjects which should not be joked about.  Jethro Bass, Chairman of the Board of Selectmen!

“Well, here comes, young Moses, I do believe,” said Jock, gathering his pegs into his apron and preparing to ascend once more.  “Callated he’d spring up pretty soon.”

“Jock, you do talk foolishly for a man who is able to build a church,” said Cynthia, as she walked away.  The young Moses referred to was Moses Hatch, Junior, son of the pillar of the Church and State, and it was an open secret that he was madly in love with Cynthia.  Let it be said of him that he was a steady-going young man, and that he sighed for the moon.

“Moses,” said the girl, when they came in sight of the elms that, shaded the gable of the parsonage, “what do you think of Jethro Bass?”

“Jethro Bass!” exclaimed honest Moses, “whatever put him into your head, Cynthy?” Had she mentioned perhaps, any other young man in Coniston, Moses would have been eaten with jealousy.

“Oh, Jock was joking about him.  What do you think of him?”

“Never thought one way or t’other,” he answered.  “Jethro never had much to do with the boys.  He’s always in that tannery, or out buyin’ of hides.  He does make a sharp bargain when he buys a hide.  We always goes shares on our’n.”

Cynthia was not only the minister’s daughter,—­distinction enough,—­her reputation for learning was spread through the country roundabout, and at the age of twenty she had had an offer to teach school in Harwich.  Once a week in summer she went to Brampton, to the Social library there, and sat at the feet of that Miss Lucretia Penniman of whom Brampton has ever been so proud—­Lucretia Penniman, one of the first to sound the clarion note for the intellectual independence of American women; who wrote the “Hymn to Coniston”; who, to the awe of her townspeople, went out into the great world and became editress of a famous woman’s journal, and knew Longfellow and Hawthorne and Bryant.  Miss Lucretia it was who started the Brampton Social Library, and filled it with such books as both sexes might read with profit.  Never was there a stricter index than hers.  Cynthia, Miss Lucretia loved, and the training of that mind was the pleasantest task of her life.

Curiosity as a factor has never, perhaps, been given its proper weight by philosophers.  Besides being fatal to a certain domestic animal, as an instigating force it has brought joy and sorrow into the lives of men and women, and made and marred careers.  And curiosity now laid hold of Cynthia Ware.  Why in the world she should ever have been curious about Jethro Bass is a mystery to many, for the two of them were as far apart as the poles.  Cynthia, of all people, took to watching the tanner’s son, and listening to the brief colloquies he had with other men at Jonah Winch’s store, when she went there to buy things for the parsonage; and