"I'm building now, back of the
cows."

"Digging, you might say," corrected Mr. Crabbe.

"Building, by God," said Mr. Barly.

Mr. Crabbe tilted back his head and cast a look of wonder at the sky.
"A hole is a hole," he said finally.

"So it is," agreed Mr. Barly, "so it is. It takes a Republican to find
that out." And, greatly amused at his own wit, Mr. Barly, who was a
Democrat, slapped his knee and burst out laughing.

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Crabbe solemnly, with pious joy, "I'm a
Republican . . . a good Republican, Mr. Barly, like my father before
me." He smote his fist into his open palm. "I'll vote the Democrats
blue in the face. If a man can't vote for his own advantage, what's
the ballot for? I say let's mind our own business. And let me get my
hands on what I want."

"Get what you can," said Mr. Barly.

"And the devil take the hindmost."

"It's all the same to me," quoth Mr. Barly, "folks being mostly alike
as two peas."

Mr. Crabbe spat into the stubble. "The way I look at it," he said,
"it's like this: first, there's me; and then there's you. That's the
way I look at it, Mr. B."

And he went home to repeat to his wife what he had said to Farmer
Barly. "I gave it to him," he declared.

In another field, Abner and John Henry, who had been to war, also
discussed politics. They agreed that the pay they received for their
work was inadequate. It seemed to them to be the fault of the
government, which was run for the benefit of others besides themselves.

That afternoon, Mr. Jeminy, with Boethius under his arm, came into
Frye's General Store, to buy a box of matches for Mrs. Grumble. As he
paid for them, he said to Thomas Frye, who had been his pupil in
school: "These little sticks of wood need only a good scratch to
confuse me, for a moment, with the God of Genesis. But they also
encourage Mrs. Grumble to burn, before I come down in the morning, the
bits of paper on which I like to scribble my notes."

At that moment, old Mrs. Ploughman entered the store to buy a paper of
pins. "Well," she cried, "don't keep me waiting all day." But when Mr.
Jeminy was gone, she said to Thomas Frye, "I guess I don't want any
pins. What was it I wanted?"

Presently she went home again, without having bought anything. "It's
all the fault of that old man," she said to herself; "he mixes a body
up so."

On his way home Mr. Jeminy passed, at the edge of the village, the
little cottage where the widow