“Sometimes,” carelessly replied Mr. Boolpin.  “There was a legerdemain man got his machinery knocked to pieces, and his head broken.  The mob was quite reasonable about the furniture, and smashed only ten seats and sixteen panes of glass.  I charged the Professor twenty dollars for damages, but took off two dollars on account of his illness.  Poor fellow! he was laid up more than a month.  Then there was a band of nigger minstrels, called the ‘Metropoliganians.’  They were regular humbugs; and so the mob took them, and tarred and feathered them in the back lot.  Damage to furniture on that occasion was only sixteen dollars; and I got every cent of it, by holding on to their trunks.  There have been a good many such little affairs in this village.  I mention these two cases only as examples.”

“And yet no people in the world is more peaceable, nor more easily satisfied, than the people of this town,” said the postmaster.  “They only axes not to be imposed on.  That’s all.”

“A kinder-hearted people don’t live on the face of this earth,” added Boolpin, stating the case in another way; “but you mustn’t give them less than twenty-five cents’ worth for a quarter.”

Tiffles replied to the effect that he would give them a dollar’s worth apiece; but, in his heart, he foresaw, with that remarkable prescience which is occasionally vouchsafed to mortals, that the panorama of Africa was doomed to be a bad failure; and he bitterly regretted that he had not tried some one of a dozen other immense speculations which he had thought of.  But he determined to give one night’s exhibition, whatever might be the consequences.  “I may as well die for an old sheep as a lamb,” thought Tiffles.

During this conversation, Patching was secretly studying the effect of the swamp, visible from the eastern windows; and Marcus was looking at the cracked wall in a fit of abstraction.

Tiffles had observed several times, that morning, a youth, or man, of singular aspect, following him.  Occasionally, on turning around suddenly, he would see this person at his elbow.  Looking behind, at the close of the colloquy with the landlord, he again saw the strange youth, or man.  The being was nearly six feet high, and powerfully built, like a strong man of twenty-five.  His face was childish even to the degree of silliness.  The mouth opened like a flytrap; the eyes were small and intensely guileless.  Only a few wrinkles, and a few hairs, which grew wide apart on his cheeks and chin, indicated his manhood.  But the oddest feature was the falling away of his forehead, at an angle which a dirty greased cap, pulled over his brow, could not conceal.

“Well, sir, what do you want?” said Tiffles.

“If you please, sir,” said the singular being, in a cracked voice, “yure the pannyrarmer, a’n’t ye?”

“Not exactly, my lad, but I own it.  And who are you?”

“My name’s Stoop, if you please, sir.”