e read aloud selections to anyone who
did not run away.

Naturally enough, from his point of view, he began with his neighbor,
fastidious Cousin Tryphena.

What Cousin Tryphena did not know about the way the world outside of
Hillsboro was run would have made a complete treatise on modern
civilization. She never took a newspaper, only borrowing, once in a while,
the local sheet to read the news items from Greenford, where she had some
distant cousins; and, though she occasionally looked at one of the
illustrated magazines, it was only at the pictures.

It is therefore plain that old Jombatiste could not have found a worse
listener for his bellowed statements that ninety per cent. of the money of
this country was in the hands of two per cent. of the population; that the
franchise was a farce because the government was controlled by a Wall
Street clique; and that any man who could not earn a good living for his
family had a moral right to shoot a millionaire. For the most part, Cousin
Tryphena counted her tatting stitches and paid not the least attention to
her malcontent neighbor. When she did listen, she did not believe a word
he said. She had lived in Hillsboro for fifty-five years and she knew what
made people poor. It was shiftlessness. There was always plenty of work to
be had at the brush-back factory for any man who had the sense and
backbone to keep at it. If they _would_ stop work in deer-week to go
hunting, or go on a spree Town-meeting day, or run away to fish, she'd
like to know what business they had blaming millionaires because they lost
their jobs. She did not expound her opinions of these points to Jombatiste
because, in the first place, she despised him for a dirty Canuck, and,
secondly, because opinions seemed shadowy and unsubstantial things to her.
The important matters were to make your starch clear and not to be late to
church.

It is proverbial that people who are mostly silent often keep for some
time a reputation for more wisdom than is theirs. Cousin Tryphena
unconsciously profited in the estimation of her neighbor by this fact of
psychology. Old Jombatiste had thundered his per cents. of the
distribution of capital for many months before he discovered that he was
on the wrong track.

Then, one winter day, as Cousin Tryphena was hanging out her washing, he
ran over to her, waving his favorite magazine. He read her a paragraph
from it, striking the paper occasionally for emphasis with his hor