"The mortgage on your father's place ?" "Yes, sir." "Doctor Prescott holds it ?" "Yes, sir." "How much is it ?" "A thousand dollars." Jerome said that with a gasp of horror and admiration at the vastness of it.

Sometimes to him that thousand dollars almost represented infinity, and seemed more than the stars of heaven.

His childish brain, which had scarcely contemplated in verity more than a shilling at a time of the coin of the realm, reeled at a thousand dollars.
"Well ?" observed Squire Merritt, kindly but perplexedly.

He wondered vaguely if the boy had come to ask him to pay the mortgage, and reflected how little ready money he had in pocket, for Eben Merritt was not thrifty with his income, which was indeed none too large, and was always in debt himself, though always sure to pay in time.
Chances were, if Squire Merritt had had the thousand dollars to hand that morning, he might have thrust it upon the boy, with no further parley, taken his rod and line, and gone forth to his fishing.

As it was, he waited for Jerome to proceed, merely adding that he was sorry that his mother did not own the place clear.
The plan that the boy unfolded, clumsily but sturdily to the end, he had thought out for himself in the darkness of the night before.