As Jerome spaded, the smell of the fresh earth came up in his face.  Now and then a gust of cold wind, sweet with unseen blossoms, smote him powerfully, bending his slender body before it like a sapling.  A bird flashed past him with a blue dazzle of wings, and Jerome stopped and looked after it.  It lit on the fence in front of the house, and shone there in the sunlight like a blue precious stone.  The boy gazed at it, leaning on his spade.  Jerome always looked hard out of all his little open windows of life, and saw every precious thing outside his daily grind of hard, toilsome childhood which came within his sight.

The bird flew away, and Jerome spaded again.  He knew that he must finish so much before dinner or his mother would scold.  He was not afraid of his mother’s sharp tongue, but he avoided provoking it with a curious politic and tolerant submission which he had learned from his father.  “Mother ain’t well, you know, an’ she’s high-sperited, and we’ve got to humor her all we can,” Abel Edwards had said, confidentially, many a time to his boy, who had listened sagely and nodded.

Jerome obeyed his mother with the patient obedience of a superior who yields because his opponent is weaker than he, and a struggle beneath his dignity, not because he is actually coerced.  Neither he nor his father ever answered back or contradicted; when her shrill voice waxed loudest and her vituperation seemed to fairly hiss in their ears, they sometimes looked at each other and exchanged a solemn wink of understanding and patience.  Neither ever opened mouth in reply.

Jerome worked fast in his magnanimous concession to his mother’s will, and had accomplished considerable when his sister opened the kitchen window, thrust out her dark head, and called in a voice shrill as her mother’s, but as yet wholly sweet, with no harsh notes in it:  “Jerome!  Jerome!  Dinner is ready.”

Jerome whooped in reply, dropped his spade, and went leaping down the hill.  When he entered the kitchen his mother was sitting at the table and Elmira was taking up the dinner.  Elmira was a small, pretty girl, with little, nervous hands and feet, and eager black eyes, like her mother’s.  She stretched on tiptoe over the fire, and ladled out a steaming mixture from the kettle with an arduous swing of her sharp elbow.  Elmira’s sleeves were rolled up and her thin, sharply-jointed, girlish arms showed.

“Don’t you know enough, without being told, to lift that kettle off the fire for Elmira?” demanded Mrs. Edwards of Jerome.

Jerome lifted the kettle off the fire without a word.

“It seems sometimes as if you might do something without being told,” said his mother.  “You could see, if you had eyes to your head, that your sister wa’n’t strong enough to lift that kettle off, and was dippin’ it up so’s to make it lighter, an’ the stew ‘most burnin’ on.”

Jerome made no response.  He sniffed hungrily at the savory steam arising from the kettle.  “What is it?” he asked his sister, who stooped over the kettle sitting on the hearth, and plunged in again the long-handled tin dipper.