"Me do it too," he would cry, when Thomas took down the rake or the hoe, and started off for his work in the fields.
"One of these days, Jimmy," the boy-farmer would reply, with a merry smile: though even then he could not help hoping there might be better things in store for the little brother he loved so dearly.
Walking all the way to Cleveland, Thomas secures a little job, and brings home his first earnings, with a bounding heart.
"Now Jimmy can have a pair of shoes," he says to his mother who cannot keep back her tears as she looks at his own bare feet.
The old cobbler comes and boards at the cabin while he makes the little shoes, and when they are completed it is hard to tell which is the happier boy,—Thomas or little Jimmy.
Four years after the father's death, a school-house is built a mile and a half away.
"Jimmy and the girls must go," says Thomas.
"Yes," replies the mother, "but I wish you could go, too."
"It wouldn't do for me to leave the farm, mother dear," says the noble boy. "One of these days, perhaps I can study at home."
The mile and a half walk to the school-house was a long, hard pull for little Jimmy, in spite of those new shoes; and many a time Mehetabel might have been seen, carrying him back and forth on her broad shoulders.