“I wish to the Lord some one would persuade him out of it,” persisted the wool-man, earnestly looking at the quiet face of his listener.  “We can’t spare old Knowles’s brain or heart while he ruins himself.  It’s something of a Communist fraternity:  I don’t know the name, but I know the thing.”

Very hard common-sense shone out of his eyes just then at the clergyman, whom he suspected of being one of Knowles’s abettors.

“There’s two ways for ’em to end.  If they’re made out of the top of society, they get so refined, so idealized, that every particle flies off on its own special path to the sun, and the Community’s broke; and if they’re made of the lower mud, they keep going down, down together, —­they live to drink and eat, and make themselves as near the brutes as they can.  It isn’t easy to believe, Sir, but it’s true.  I have seen it.  I’ve seen every one of them the United States can produce.  It’s facts, Sir; and facts, as Lord Bacon says, are the basis of every sound speculation.’”

The last sentence was slowly brought out, as quotations were not exactly his forte, but, as he said afterwards,—­“You see, that nailed the parson.”

The parson nodded gravely.

“You’ll find no such experiment in the Bible,” threw in the young doctor, alluding to “serious things” as a peace-offering to his reverend friend.

“One, I believe,” dryly.

“Well,” broke in the farmer, folding up his wool, “that’s neither here nor there.  This experiment of Knowles’s is like nothing known since the Creation.  Plan of his own.  He spends his days now hunting out the gallows-birds out of the dens in town here, and they’re all to be transported into the country to start a new Arcadia.  A few men and women like himself, but the bulk is from the dens, I tell you.  All start fair, level ground, perpetual celibacy, mutual trust, honor, rise according to the stuff that’s in them,—­pah! it makes me sick!”

“Knowles’s inclination to that sort of people is easily explained,” spitefully lisped the doctor.  “Blood, Sir.  His mother was a half-breed Creek, with all the propensities of the redskins to fire-water and ‘itching palms.’  Blood will out.”

“Here he is,” maliciously whispered the wool-man.  “No, it’s Holmes,” he added, after the doctor had started into a more respectful posture, and glanced around frightened.

He, the doctor, rose to meet Holmes’s coming footstep,—­“a low fellah, but always sure to be the upper dog in the fight, goin’ to marry the best catch,” etc., etc.  The others, on the contrary, put on their hats and sauntered away into the street.