"Can you name any good reason why I should not be here?" asked Haldane, somewhat nettled.
"No, but I could plenty of bad reasons."
"Keep them to yourself then," said the young man, sullenly resuming his work.
"You talk as if you was an honest man," growled the old gentleman, hobbling into the house.
Sitting down in his stout oak chair to rest himself, he stared in silence for a time at the changes that Haldane had wrought. At last he commenced:
"Now, Jeremiah Growther, I hope you can see that you are a perfect pig! I hope you can see that dirt and confusion are your nateral elements; and you had to live like a pig till a boy just out of jail came to show you what it was to live like a decent human. But you've been showed before, and you'll get things mixed up to-morrow. A-a-h!
"Where's that young fellow goin' to sleep to-night? That's none o' your business. Yes, 'tis my business, too. I'm always mighty careful to know where I'm goin' to sleep, and if I don't sleep well my cat and dog hear from me the next day. You could be mighty comfortable tonight in your good bed with this young chap sittin' on a curb-stun in the rain; but I be hanged if you shall be. It's beginnin' to rain now—it's goin' to be a mean night—mean as yourself—a cold, oncomfortable drizzle; just such a night as makes these poor homeless devils feel that since they are half under water they might as well go down to the river and get under altogether. P'raps they do it sometimes in the hope of finding a warm, dry place somewhere. Dreadful suddint change for 'em, though! And it's we respectable, comfortable people that's to blame for these suddint changes half the time.
"You know that heady young chap out there will go to the bad if somebody don't pull him up. You know that it would be mean as dirt to let him go wanderin' off to-night with only fifty cents in his pocket, tryin' to find some place to put his head in out of the storm; and yet you want to git out of doin' anything more for him. You're thinkin' how much more comfortable it will be to sit dozin' in your chair, and not have any stranger botherin' round. But I'll head you off agin in spite of your cussed, mean, stingy, selfish, old, shrivelled-up soul, that would like to take its ease even though the hull world was a-groanin' outside the door. A-a-h!"
Having made it clear to the perverse Jeremiah Growther—against whom he seemed to hold such an inveterate spite—what he must do, he arose and called to Haldane:
"What are you doin' out there in the rain?"