“Fraud!”
Only two men sat still by the window of the darkened room. The rest rushed out.
The street was in an uproar, hats crushed over heads, fists shaken in the air to the instructive comment of the moon.
“How foolish, oh, mendicants! How do men make for themselves troubles, as though one should stir quiet waters with his hand, saying, 'It is a storm. The gods have afflicted me.'”
“How foolish!” said one of the men at the darkened window. “Those boys are terribly anxious to carry that Ward, and no point in it, Dick!”
“Suppose I'd been out canvassing for Reform, Wood? Think you'd have lost?”
Wood peered curiously at Hennion in the half-lit dusk. “Like enough! Well—want anything in particular? I admit the bill, if it ain't too big.”
“I don't want anything.”
Wood tilted his chair and was silent a moment.
“Look what comes of making rows,” he went on. “I wouldn't have that Ward now for a gift. The Chronicle's red in the face with wrath and happiness. Everybody's hair on end as it is. Disgusting, ain't it? Well—down east, where the land's tilted up so you can turn a section over bottom upwards by heaving one end with a rail, well—there was a man there had a farm at the bottom of a long hill, and his neighbour's punkins up above used to roll down on him. But he didn't make any row, because his yard was littered with punkins, no. He ate the punkins. Well, now, take the neighbour above, he might have gone down and called somebody a thief for not returning strayed punkins, and two pillars of the church might have disliked each other. But he didn't. He built a board fence along the lower edge of his cornfield and caught his own punkins. And there was mutual respect, mutual respect. Well—the boys, they always want to fight. They go round saying, 'The old man's level-headed,' but they ain't satisfied with building that fence to catch those punkins without heaving a rock down an aggravating man's chimney, or else it makes 'em mad to have punkins rolled at 'em, and moreover they don't roll fast enough. Disgusting, ain't it?”