There was no form of their bullying
meanness or the cowardice of their brutal strength which he did not
experience. He was born under a fading or falling star,--the
inheritor of some anxious or unhappy mood of his parents, which
gave its fast color to the threads out of which his innocent being
was woven.
Even the good people of the neighborhood, never accustomed to look
below the externals of appearance and manner, saw in his shrinking
face and awkward motions only the signs of a cringing, abject soul.
"You'll be no more of a man than Jake Flint!" was the reproach
which many a farmer addressed to his dilatory boy; and thus the
parents, one and all, came to repeat the sins of the children.
If, therefore, at school and "before folks," Jacob's position was
always uncomfortable and depressing, it was little more cheering at
home. His parents, as all the neighbors believed, had been
unhappily married, and, though the mother died in his early
childhood, his father remained a moody, unsocial man, who rarely
left his farm except on the 1st of April every year, when he went
to the county town for the purpose of paying the interest upon a
mortgage.
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