ere maned like a
lion, and, though he wore his thin, fair hair short, one could seem
to see it flung back in glistening lines. He spread his hands as if
he were addressing an audience, and as he did so the parlor door
opened and Jim Tenny and Eva stood there, listening.

"I tell you, sir," shouted Nahum Beals, "the time will come when you
will all thank God that you belong to the poor and down-trodden of
this earth, and not to the rich and great--the time will come.
There's knives to sharpen to-day, and wood for scaffolds as plenty
as in the days of the French Revolution, and the hand that marks the
time of day on the clock of men's patience with wrong and oppression
has near gone round to the same hour and minute."

Andrew Brewster looked at him, with a curious expression half of
disgust, half of sympathy. His sense of dignity in the face of
adversity inherited from his New England race was shocked; he was
not one to be blindly swayed by another's fervor even when his own
wrongs were in question. He would not have made a good follower in a
revolution, nor a leader. He would simply have found his own place
of fixed principle and abided there. Then, too, he had a judicial
mind which could combine the elements of counsels for and against
his own cause.

"Now, look at here," he said, slowly, "I ain't goin' to say I don't
think we ain't in a hard place, and that there's somethin' wrong
that's to blame for it, but I dunno but you go most too far, Nahum;
or, rather, I dunno as you go far enough. I dunno but we've got to
dig down past the poor and the rich, farther into the everlastin'
foundations of things to get at what's the trouble."

Jim Tenny, standing in the parlor doorway, with an arm around Eva's
waist, broke in suddenly with a defiant laugh. "I don't care nothin'
about the everlastin' foundations of things, and I don't care a darn
about the rich and the poor," he proclaimed. "I'm willin' to leave
that to lecturers and dynamiters, and let 'em settle it if they can.
I don't grudge the rich nothin', and I ain't goin' to call the
Almighty to account for givin' somebody else the biggest piece of
pie; mebbe it would give me the stomach-ache. All I'm concerned
about is Lloyd's shut-down."

"That's so," said Eva.

"I tell you, sir, it ain't the facts of the case, but the reason for
the facts, which we must think of," maintained Nahum Beals.

"I don't care a darn for the facts nor the reasons," said Jim Tenny;
"all