"Now, watch," continued Mr. Hodgkins. "You see, children, this old mud turtle is going on about his business just as all the creatures around here are doing, only he moves a little slowly, to be sure. Now I am going to give this brown hen over here a touch with my stick and you'll see what will happen."
"It'll thquawk!" predicted Stubbins, and he was right. The brown hen made herself heard all over the yard as she flew away.
"Made the feathers fly, didn't she?" laughed the man. "Now we'll see what the mud turtle will do. I won't hit him a bit harder than I did the hen."
A knock on the mud turtle's back; he stopped crawling and in went his head.
"You'd think he was killed!" Hannah exclaimed.
"Well, he ith a queer one," commented Stubbins.
"Now you know why I call the mud turtle my brother," declared Mr. Hodgkins. "Most people are like hens. When something strikes them hard they make a big fuss about it, and after they flutter around a while they go about their business exactly as they did before. I'm like the mud turtle. I crawled into my shell, and now they say I'm a queer one, as Stubbins says of the turtle."
Hannah turned red. How did Mr. Hodgkins know that the neighbours called him queer, and why was he a friendless man?
"Did something strike you hard, Mr. Hodgkins?" she asked, in tones of sympathy.
"I should like to tell you and your little brother about it if you care to listen," was the reply. "You children seem like old friends. I've stayed so long in my shell I seem to have forgotten who my friends were, and I once had plenty of them. I suppose I have myself to thank, but do you know I don't suppose there's any one left in the world who ever gives me a kindly thought."