and a chunk of wood.' Now what kind of an answer was that, I want
to know!"

Jed worked at carpentering for a number of years, sometimes going
as far away as Ostable to obtain employment. And then his mother
was seized with the illness from which, so she said, she never
recovered. It is true that Doctor Parker, the Orham physician,
declared that she had recovered, or might recover if she cared to.
Which of the pair was right does not really matter. At all events
Mrs. Winslow, whether she recovered or not, never walked abroad
again. She was "up and about," as they say in Orham, and did some
housework, after a fashion, but she never again set foot across the
granite doorstep of the Winslow cottage. Probably the poor woman's
mind was slightly affected; it is charitable to hope that it was.
It seems the only reasonable excuse for the oddity of her behavior
during the last twenty years of her life, for her growing
querulousness and selfishness and for the exacting slavery in which
she kept her only son.

During those twenty years whatever ambition Jedidah Edgar Wilfred
may once have had was thoroughly crushed. His mother would not
hear of his leaving her to find better work or to obtain promotion.
She needed him, she wailed; he was her life, her all; she should
die if he left her. Some hard-hearted townspeople, Captain
Hunniwell among them, disgustedly opined that, in view of such a
result, Jed should be forcibly kidnaped forthwith for the general
betterment of the community. But Jed himself never rebelled. He
cheerfully gave up his youth and early middle age to his mother and
waited upon her, ran her errands, sat beside her practically every
evening and read romance after romance aloud for her benefit. And