Jerome at twelve walked as if he had held plough-shares, bent over potato hills, and hewn wood in cedar swamps for half a century.

Jerome's feet were bare, and his red rasped ankles showed below his hitching trousers.
His poor winter shoes had quite failed him for many weeks, his blue stockings had shown at the gaps in their sides which had torn away from his mother's strong mending.

Now the soles had gone, and his uncle Ozias Lamb, who was a cobbler, could not put in new ones because there was not strength enough in the uppers to hold them.
"You can't have soles in shoes any more than you can in folks, without some body," said Ozias Lamb.

It seemed as if Ozias might have made and presented some new shoes, soles and all, to his needy nephew, but he was very poor, and not young, and worked painfully to make every cent count.

So Jerome went barefoot after the soles parted from his shoes; but he did not care, because it was spring and the snow was gone.