“It is just ruin, Jacob Hoar. If some great shock—say a mountain of snow, or a thunderbolt—descended suddenly from the skies and destroyed everything there was in your home, leaving but the bare walls standing, what a dreadful calamity you would think it. How bitterly you’d bemoan it!—perhaps almost feel inclined, if you only dared, to reproach Heaven for its cruelty! But you—you bring on this calamity yourself, of your own free and deliberate will. You have dismantled your home with your own fingers; you have taken out your goods and sold or pledged them, to buy food. I hear you have parted with all.”
“A’most,” assented Hoar readily; as if it quite pleased him the Squire should show up the case at its worst.
“Put it that you resume work to-morrow, you don’t resume it as a free man. You’ll have a load of debt and embarrassment on your shoulders. You will have your household goods to redeem—if they are then still redeemable: you will have your clothes and shoes to buy, to replace present rags: while on your mind will lie the weight of all this past time of trouble, cropping up every half-hour like a nightmare. Now—is the future benefit you hint at worth all this?”
Hoar twitched a thorny spray off the hedge behind the pales, and twirled it about between his teeth.
“Any way,” he said, the look of perplexity clearing somewhat on his face, “I be but doing as my mates do; and we are a-doing for the best. So far as we are told and believe, it’ll be all for the best.”
“Then do it,” returned the Squire in a passion; and went stamping away with his gun.
“Johnny, they are all pig-headed together,” he presently said, as we crossed the stile into the field of stubble whence the corn had been reaped. “One can’t help being sorry for them: they are blinded by specious arguments that will turn out, I fear, to be all moonshine. Hold my gun, lad. Where’s that dog, now? Here, Dash, Dash, Dash!”
Dash came running up; and Tod with him.