Hugh began a little to awaken. He lived with his employer, Henry Shepard,
and his wife, Sarah Shepard, and for the first time in his life sat down
regularly at table. His life, lying on the river bank through long summer
afternoons or sitting perfectly still for endless hours in a boat, had bred
in him a dreamy detached outlook on life. He found it hard to be definite
and to do definite things, but for all his stupidity the boy had a great
store of patience, a heritage perhaps from his mother. In his new place the
station master's wife, Sarah Shepard, a sharp-tongued, good-natured woman,
who hated the town and the people among whom fate had thrown her, scolded
at him all day long. She treated him like a child of six, told him how
to sit at table, how to hold his fork when he ate, how to address people
who came to the house or to the station. The mother in her was aroused by
Hugh's helplessness and, having no children of her own, she began to take
the tall awkward boy to her heart. She was a small woman and when she stood
in the house scolding the great stupid boy who stared down at her with
his small perplexed eyes, the two made a picture that afforded endless
amusement to her husband, a short fat bald-headed man who went about clad
in blue overalls and a blue cotton shirt. Coming to the back door of his
house, that was within a stone's throw of the station, Henry Shepard stood
with his hand on the door-jamb and watched the woman and the boy. Above
the scolding voice of the woman his own voice arose. "Look out, Hugh," he
called. "Be on the jump, lad! Perk yourself up. She'll be biting you if you
don't go mighty careful in there."

Hugh got little money for his work at the railroad station but for the
first time in his life he began to fare well. Henry Shepard bought the
boy clothes, and his wife, Sarah, who was a master of the art of cooking,
loaded the table with good things to eat. Hugh ate until both the man and
woman declared he would burst if he did not stop. Then when they were not
looking he went into the station yard and crawling under a bush went to