was worse off, because he had no natural prey. But he never made a
complaint.

Had any one inquired if he were hungry, he would have flown at him as
he had done at little Lucina Merritt when she offered him her
gingerbread. He knew, and all his family knew, that the neighbors
thought they had not enough to eat, and the knowledge so stung their
pride that it made them defy the fact itself. They would not own to
each other that they were hungry; they denied it fiercely to their
own craving stomachs.

Jerome had had nothing that morning but a scanty spoonful of
corn-meal porridge, but he would have maintained stoutly that he had
eaten a good breakfast. He took another piece of sassafras from his
pocket and chewed it as he went along. After all, now the larder of
Nature was open and the lock of the frost on her cupboards was
broken, a boy would not fare so badly; he could not starve. There was
sassafras root in the swamps--plenty of it for the digging; there
were young winter-green leaves, stinging pleasantly his palate with
green aromatic juice; later there would be raspberries and
blackberries and huckleberries. There were also the mysterious cedar
apples, and the sour-sweet excrescences sometimes found on swamp
bushes. These last were the little rarities of Nature's table which a
boy would come upon by chance when berrying and snatch with delighted
surprise. They appealed to his imagination as well as to his tongue,
since they belonged not to the known fruits in his spelling-book and
dictionary, and possessed a strange sweetness of fancy and mystery
beyond their woodland savor. In a few months, too, the garden would
be grown and there would be corn and beans and potatoes. Then
Jerome's lank outlines would begin to take on curves and the hungry