It was the first love of his boyish heart; he had taken the green woods and fields for his sweetheart, and must now put her to only sordid uses, to her degradation and his.
Sometimes, in a curious rebellion against what he scarcely knew, he would return home without a salable thing in hand, nothing but a pretty and useless collection of wild flowers and sedges, little swamp-apples, and perhaps a cast bird-feather or two, and meet his mother's stern reproof with righteously undaunted front.
"I don't care," he said once, looking at her with a meaning she could not grasp; nor, indeed, could he fathom it himself.

"I ain't goin' to sell everything; if I do I'll have to sell myself." "I'd like to know what you mean," said his mother, sharply.
"I mean I'm goin' to keep some things myself," said Jerome, and pattered up to his chamber to stow away his treasures, with his mother's shrill tirade about useless truck following him.

Ann was a good taskmistress; there were, indeed, great powers of administration in the keen, alert mind in that little frail body.

Given a poor house encumbered by a mortgage, a few acres of stony land, and two children, the elder only fourteen, she worked miracles almost.

Jerome had shown uncommon, almost improbable, ability in his difficulties when Abel had disappeared and her strength had failed her, but afterwards her little nervous feminine clutch on the petty details went far towards saving the ship.
Had it not been for his mother, Jerome could not have carried out his own plans.