The vender of stimulants said this to Deacon Quickset, for the two men were incessantly arguing over the liquor question, and never lost an opportunity of bringing up a new point about it when they met by any chance. Weitz was a public-spirited and intelligent citizen, and the deacon believed that if his opinions about the moral nature of his business could be changed there would be a great gain for the temperance cause in Bruceton. Besides, Weitz was a well-to-do man and saved a great deal of money, some of which the deacon had invested for him, and all of which the deacon desired to handle, for he was a man of many enterprises, and, like most other men of the kind, always had more ways than money.
"You're all wrong about that, Weitz," said the deacon, sitting upon an empty beer-barrel in front of the liquor-store. The deacon was accustomed to say, with a grim smile, that he was one of the very few men in business whose reputation would allow him to sit upon a beer-barrel without giving rise to any suspicions.
"Deacon," said the liquor-dealer, "you hadn't ought to talk about vat you don't understand. How long since you stopped drinkin'?"
"Now, see here, Weitz, what do you mean, to ask me a question like that? You ought to know well enough that I never drank in my life. If I haven't told you so again and again, I should think other people could have done it."
"Never drank anyding, eh? never in your life? Vell, vell!" said the proprietor, caressing the beer-shop cat for a moment, "dat explains a good many dings about you dat I never understood before. I tell you vat I tink, deacon: if you'd been brought up in my country, mit all de brains you've got in your head, and yoost could'a'had a lot of German beer put inside of you besides, you'd been about de finest man in de United States now. Den, besides dat, of course, you ought to belong to my shurch, too."
"Your church!" sneered the deacon.
"Come, now, deacon," said the shopkeeper, abruptly dropping the cat, "you can turn up your nose at my ideas all you vant, but you mustn't turn it up at my shurch. I don't do dat to you, and don't you forget it, eider."
"That's all right, Conrad; I didn't mean to do it. Of course, every man will believe the way he is brought up. But I hope you won't go to telling anybody else in this town that that poor convict ought to be drinking and will have to do it again; because it might get to his ears, you know, and if it did it might break him down, and then he'd go to lying and stealing and loafing and fighting again, and there is no knowing whose chicken-coops and wood-piles would have to suffer. Yours might be one of the first of the lot."
"Vell," said the German, "is dat de vay you look at the question?"
"It's a fact, isn't it?"