Like to know what you're tryin' to give me victuals for! Don't want any of your old gingerbread!" "It ain't old, honest," pleaded Lucina, tearfully.

"It ain't old--Hannah, she just baked it this morning." But the boy was gone, pelting hard across the field, and all there was for the little girl to do was to go home, with her sassafras in her pocket and her gingerbread in her hand, with an aromatic savor on her tongue and the sting of slighted kindness in her heart, with her cosset lamb trotting at heel, and tell her mother.
Jerome did not return to his nook in the rock.

As he neared it he heard the hollow note of a horn from the northwest.
"S'pose mother wants me," he muttered, and went on past the rock ledge to the west, and climbed the stone wall into the first of the three fields which separated him from his home.

Across the young springing grass went Jerome--a slender little lad moving with an awkward rustic lope.

It was the gait of the homely toiling men of the village which his young muscles had caught, as if they had in themselves powers of observation and assimilation.