me, as from his strong accent, it was evident that
old Jombatiste belonged, by birth, to our French-Canadian colony, he never
associated himself with that easy-going, devoutly Catholic, law-abiding,
and rather unlettered group of our citizens. He allied himself with quite
another class, making no secret of the fact that he was an out-and-out
Socialist, Anti-clerical, Syndicalist, Anarchist, Nihilist. ... We in
Hillsboro are not acute in distinguishing between the different shades of
radicalism, and never have been able exactly to place him, except that,
beside his smashing, loudly-voiced theories, young Arthur Robbins'
Progressivism sounds like old Martin Pelham's continued jubilation over
the Hayes campaign.

The central article of Jombatiste's passionately held creed seemed to be
that everything was exactly wrong, and that, while the Socialist party was
not nearly sweeping enough in its ideas, it was, as yet, the best means
for accomplishing the inevitable, righteous overturning of society.
Accordingly, he worked incessantly, not only at his cobbling, but at any
odd job he could find to do, lived the life of an anchorite, went in rags,
ate mainly crackers and milk, and sent every penny he could save to the
Socialist Headquarters. We knew about this not only through his own
trumpeting of the programme of his life, but because Phil Latimer, the
postmaster, is cousin to us all and often told us about the money-orders,
so large that they must have represented almost all the earnings of the
fanatical old shoemaker.

And yet he was never willing to join in any of our charitable enterprises,
although his ardent old heart was evidently as tender as it was hot.
Nothing threw him into such bellowing fury as cruelty. He became the
terror of all our boys who trapped rabbits, and, indeed, by the sole
influence of his whirlwind descents upon them, and his highly illegal
destruction of their traps, he practically made that boyish pastime a
thing of the past in Hillsboro. Somehow, though the boys talked mightily
about how they'd have the law of dirty, hot-tempered old Jombatiste,
nobody cared really to face him. He had on tap a stream of red-hot
vituperation astonishingly varied for a man of his evident lack of early
education. Perhaps it came from his incessant reading and absorption of
Socialist and incendiary literature.

He took two Socialist newspapers, and nobody knows how many queer little
inflammatory magazines from which h