ny,
blackened, shoemaker's hand, and following her as she moved along the
clothes-lines----

"And it is thus definitely _proved,_" he shouted in conclusion, "that
Senator Burlingame was in the pay of J.D. Darby, when he held up the Rouse
Workingman's Bill in the Senate Committee...." He stopped and glared
triumphantly at his neighbor. A rare impulse of perversity rose in Cousin
Tryphena's unawakened heart. She took a clothes-pin out of her mouth and
asked with some exasperation, "Well, what _of_ it!" a comment on his
information which sent the old man reeling back as though she had struck
him.

In the conversation which followed, old Jombatiste, exploring at last
Cousin Tryphena's mind, leaned giddily over the abyss of her ignorance of
political economy and sociology, dropping one exploring plummet after
another into its depths, only to find them fathomless. He went shakily
back to his own house, silenced for once.

But, although for the first time he neglected work to do it, he returned
to the attack the next day with a new weapon. He made no more remarks
about industrial slavery, nor did he begin, as was his wont, with the
solemnly enunciated axiom, "Wealth comes from labor alone!" He laid down,
on the Sheraton sideboard, an armful of his little magazines, and settled
himself in a chair, observing with a new comprehension how instinctively
Cousin Tryphena reached for her tatting as he began to read aloud. He read
the story of a man who was burned to death in molten steel because his
employers did not install a rather expensive safety device, and who left
a young widow and three children. These tried to earn their livings by
making artificial flowers. They could earn, all of them working together,
three cents an hour. When the last dollar of the dead father's savings was
used up, and there was talk of separating the family so that the children
could be put in an asylum, the mother drowned the three little ones and
herself after them. Cousin Tryphena dropped her tatting, her country-bred
mind reeling. "Didn't she have any _folks_ to help her out?"

Jombatiste explained that she came from East Poland, so that her folks, if
indeed she had any, were too far away to be of use. He struck one fist
inside his palm with a fierce gesture, such as he used when he caught a
boy trapping, and cried, "... and that in a country that produces three
times the food it consumes." For the first time, a statistical statement
awoke an ec