Little Myron was often impressed with the truth that a single leaf broken from a growing hopvine kills the whole spray. She learned to "pick up her feet," as her father expressed it, and step daintily between the wandering vines, so that no slurring footstep might injure them.
Jed Holder had carried on the broom-making for many years very systematically. Year by year he rented from Sol Disney a bit of the virgin soil of the woodland, and the tall brown tassel of the broom corn overtopped the stamps in the clearing. Year by year the little patch of corn crept nearer and nearer the limit of Disney's diminishing woodland—seeming, as Jed Holder said, "to sweep the trees off before it," but being in its turn swept aside by waves of golden grain.
It was a sore day to Jed Holder when he sent off his first order for Western broom corn, forced to do so by the impossibility of renting ground rich enough to perfect and mature his crop.
In the short winter days Jed used to work in Disney's brush helping to "clear" it. In return for his services he received all the young maples they encountered: out of these in the long winter evenings he fashioned his broom handles.
Jed never could remember how the knowledge was conveyed to him that broom handles were being made by the thousands by a machine out of the refuse in the wake of logging camps.
If the recognition of this iconoclastic fact was not an intuition, it must have been something very like one—some transmission of a half contemptuous thought from the brain of the smart groceryman in the city when he ridiculed the price Jed asked for his hand-made brooms. Jed pondered over the matter much, but never could recall the source of his information. But when he lay in his last illness, watching the shadow of the hopvine on the blinds, all these tormenting thoughts vanished. The murmurs that fell from his lips were all of other days, of hop picking, of England, of Kentish lanes and birds, of one whom he named lovingly as "Myron lass" and yet did not seem to identify with the girl who waited upon him so untiringly, under the direction of her grandmother, an old, old woman, bent with rheumatism, and hard of face and heart, whose lips set cruelly and eyes grew stony when her gray-haired son babbled of "Myron lass." When he lay in his coffin she could not grieve, for raging that he was not to lie with all his kin in Kent.
She made Myron suffer vicariously for her long dead mother, whose death coming soon after Myron's birth had driven Jed Holder to seek strange scenes, away from where he had known the fullest happiness of which he was capable.
But Myron bore her grandmother's bad temper with patience and without bitterness. Her father often said to her, "The yeast is bitter, but it is the yeast that makes bread sweet."
Jed Holder died one day in autumn, when the aromatic green cones had been picked from the hops and lay browning upon paper-covered boards in the sun. The last breath Jed Holder drew savored of their fragrance, and the aroma of the hops dispelled the faint odor of mortality in the death chamber.
The winter succeeding his death was a long and bitter one. Fuel was high; and however sparingly bought, still the plainest provisions cost money. Albeit Myron and her grandmother lived frugally, yet they exhausted Jed's poor hoardings very soon. Spring found them penniless.