thing to make everybody hate you. You know what it says in the
Bible about movin' a landmark. You'll get your rights; 't is just as
much your right to let the trees stand, and please folks."

"Come, come, Mary Hannah!" said John, a little moved in spite of
himself. "Don't work yourself up so. I ain't told you I was goin' to
cut 'em, have I? But if I ever do, 't is because I've been twitted
into it, an' told they were everybody's trees but mine."

He pleased himself at the moment by thinking that he could take back
his promise to Ferris, even if it cost five dollars to do it. Why
couldn't people leave a man alone? It was the women's faces at the
window that had decided his angry mind, but now they thought it all
his fault. Ferris would say, "So your women folks persuaded you out of
it." It would be no harm to give Ferris a lesson: he had used a man's
being excited and worked upon by interfering neighbors to drive a
smart bargain. The trees were worth fifty dollars apiece, if they were
worth a cent. John Packer transferred his aggrieved thoughts from his
family to Ferris himself. Ferris had driven a great many sharp
bargains; he had plenty of capital behind him, and had taken advantage
of the hard times, and of more than one man's distress, to buy
woodland at far less than its value. More than that, he always
stripped land to the bare skin; if the very huckleberry bushes and
ferns had been worth anything to him, he would have taken those,
insisting upon all or nothing, and, regardless of the rights of
forestry, he left nothing to grow; no sapling-oak or pine stood where
his hand had been. The pieces of young growing woodland that might
have made their owners rich at some later day were sacrificed to his
greed of gain. You had to give him half your trees to make him give
half price for the rest. Some men yielded to him out of ignorance, or
avarice for immediate gains, and others out of bitter necessity. Once
or twice he had even brought men to their knees and gained his point
by involving them in money difficulties, through buying up their
mortgages and notes. He could sell all the wood and timber he could
buy, and buy so cheap, to larger dealers; and a certain builder having
given him an order for some unusually wide and clear pine at a large
price, his withering eye had been directed toward the landmark trees
on John Packer's farm.

On the road home from the Packer farm that winter afternoon
Mr. Ferris's sleigh-bells