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Jerome: a Poor Man: Merritt

Jerome called on Doctor Prescott, who deigned to read his paper and then summarily dismissed him. He hated him in a strange way for a man to hate a boy. On his way home Jerome encountered Squire Merritt coming out of a woodland road with a great string of fish. "What luck, son?" he called out. "He turned me out. I'd like to kill him."

The squire laughed and made Jerome walk along with him to his sister Camilla's, who kept elderly maiden state in the old Merritt house. Jerome always remembered that hour of tea-drinking and cake-eating in the arbor with Squire Merritt and his sister and little Lucina, as he would have an especially beautiful turn of his kaleidoscope of life. Until he was much older Jerome did not fully comprehend in what way Eben Merritt had solved his financial difficulties. Then he discovered that the squire had made great sacrifices of his none too large competency to buy from Doctor Prescott, and take the Edwards mortgage into his own hands. Now life began to look brighter for Jerome. He could not go to school in the ordinary sense, so he went direct to Nature. He, in his scanty free time, roamed fields and woods. Jake Noyes, a queer character who ostensibly was Doctor Prescott's coachman, but who had been permitted to assimilate, and some said had even been taught, much of the doctor's medical lore, taught Jerome much about simples.

Jerome attained a local under-celebrity, since he gave aid for nothing and with success.

Gradually Jerom's business ideas developed and strengthened. There was an exceptional chance for a sawmill in the village. He went one evening to Lawyer Means with a request that he should sell two hundred and sixty-five dollars' worth of his land on Graystone Brook, and came away with the deed. He then began to save for the mill..