he had never known a love like this. He may have imagined it once, back
in the bright days of his youth; but the dreams of its fulfilment had
fallen far short of the exquisite touch of the reality in which he now
spent his days at home. In summer, when she sat, in the face of all the
conventions of the village, reading under the butternut tree before the
house, she would feel his eyes upon her, and the mysterious yearning in
them would startle her. Often during her lessons with Mr. Satterlee in
the parlor of the parsonage she would hear a noise outside and perceive
Jethro leaning against the pillar. Both Cynthia and Mr. Satterlee knew
that he was there, and both, by a kind of tacit agreement, ignored the
circumstance.

Cynthia, in this period, undertook Jethro's education, too. She could
have induced him to study the making of Latin verse by the mere asking.
During those days which he spent at home, and which he had grown to value
beyond price, he might have been seen seated on the ground with his back
to the butternut tree while Cynthia read aloud from the well-worn books
which had been her father's treasures, books that took on marvels of
meaning from her lips. Cynthia's powers of selection were not remarkable
at this period, and perhaps it was as well that she never knew the effect
of the various works upon the hitherto untamed soul of her listener.
Milton and Tennyson and Longfellow awoke in him by their very music
troubled and half-formed regrets; Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" set up
tumultuous imaginings; but the "Life of Jackson" (as did the story of
Napoleon long ago) stirred all that was masterful in his blood.
Unlettered as he was, Jethro had a power which often marks the American
of action--a singular grasp of the application of any sentence or
paragraph to his own life; and often, about this time, he took away the
breath of a judge or a senator by flinging at them a chunk of Carlyle or
Parton.