When the bell had stopped ringing, he arose and climbed over the stone wall, then went across a field to the path skirting the poor-house which he had used to follow to school.
When he came opposite the poor-house in the hollow, he looked down at it.

The day was so mild that the paupers were swarming into evidence like insects.

Many of the house windows were wide open, and old heads with palsied nods, like Chinese toys, appeared in them; some children were tumbling about before the door.
Old Peter Thomas--who seemed to have become crystallized, as it were, in age and decrepitude, and advanced no further in either--was pottering around the garden, eying askant, like an old robin, the new plough furrows.

Pauper women humped their calico backs over the green slopes of the fields, searching for dandelion greens, but not digging, because it was Sunday.
Their shrill, plaintive voices, calling to one another, came plainly to Jerome.

When he reached the barn, there sat Mindy Toggs, as of old, chanting his accusatory refrain, "Simon Basset, Simon Basset." Hitherto Jerome had viewed all this humiliation of poverty from a slight but no less real eminence of benefaction; to-day he had a miserable sense of community with it.