“When will you give it to me?”

“I’ll stop at the tannery when I come back from Brampton,” she said, and drove on.  Once she gave a fleeting glance over her shoulder, and he was still standing where she had left him.

When she returned, in the yellow afternoon light that flowed over wood and pasture, he came out of the tannery door.  Jake Wheeler or Speedy Bates, the journeyman tailoress, from whom little escaped, could not have said it was by design—­thought nothing, indeed, of that part of it.

“As I live!” cried Speedy from the window to Aunt Lucy Prescott in the bed, “if Cynthy ain’t givin’ him a book as big as the Bible!”

Aunt Lucy hoped, first, that it was the Bible, and second, that Jethro would read it.  Aunt Lucy, and Established Church Coniston in general, believed in snatching brands from the burning, and who so deft as Cynthia at this kind of snatching!  So Cynthia herself was a hypocrite for once, and did not know it.  At that time Jethro’s sins were mostly of omission.  As far as rum was concerned, he was a creature after Aunt Lucy’s own heart, for he never touched it:  true, gaunt Deacon Ira Perkins, tithing-man, had once chided him for breaking the Sabbath—­shooting at a fox.

To return to the book.  As long as he lived, Jethro looked back to the joy of the monumental task of mastering its contents.  In his mind, Napoleon became a rough Yankee general; of the cities, villages, and fortress he formed as accurate a picture as a resident of Venice from Marco Polo’s account of Tartary.  Jethro had learned to read, after a fashion, to write, add, multiply, and divide.  He knew that George Washington and certain barefooted companions had forced a proud Britain to her knees, and much of the warring in the book took color from Captain Timothy Prescott’s stories of General Stark and his campaigns, heard at Jonah Winch’s store.  What Paris looked like, or Berlin, or the Hospice of St. Bernard—­though imaged by a winter Coniston—­troubled Jethro not at all; the thing that stuck in his mind was that Napoleon—­for a considerable time, at least—­compelled men to do his bidding.  Constitutions crumble before the Strong.  Not that Jethro philosophized about constitutions.  Existing conditions presented themselves, and it occurred to him that there were crevices in the town system, and ways into power through the crevices for men clever enough to find them.

A week later, and in these same great woods on the way to Brampton, Cynthia overtook him once more.  It was characteristic of him that he plunged at once into the subject uppermost in his mind.

“Not a very big place, this Corsica—­not a very big place.”

“A little island in the Mediterranean,” said Cynthia.

“Hum.  Country folks, the Bonapartes—­country folks?”

Cynthia laughed.

“I suppose you might call them so,” she said.  “They were poor, and lived out of the world.”