Sometimes he felt as if he could see the top of Doctor Prescott's head when he met him on the street.
Poor Jerome had few of the natural joys and amusements of boyhood; he was obliged to resort to his fertile and ardent imagination, or the fibre of his spirit would have been relaxed with the melancholy of age.

While the other boys played in the present, whooping and frisking, as free of thought as young animals, Jerome worked and played in the future.

Some air-castles he built so often that he seemed to fairly dwell in them; some dreams he dreamed so often that he went about always with them in his eyes.

One fancy which specially commended itself to him was the one that he was rich, that he owned half the town, that in some manner Doctor Prescott's and Simon Basset's acres had passed into his possession, and he could give them away.

He established all the town paupers in the doctor's clover.