He took two Socialist newspapers, and nobody knows how many queer little inflammatory magazines from which he read aloud selections to anyone who did not run away.

Naturally enough, from his point of view, he began with his neighbor, fastidious Cousin Tryphena.

What Cousin Tryphena did not know about the way the world outside of Hillsboro was run would have made a complete treatise on modern civilization.  She never took a newspaper, only borrowing, once in a while, the local sheet to read the news items from Greenford, where she had some distant cousins; and, though she occasionally looked at one of the illustrated magazines, it was only at the pictures.

It is therefore plain that old Jombatiste could not have found a worse listener for his bellowed statements that ninety per cent. of the money of this country was in the hands of two per cent. of the population; that the franchise was a farce because the government was controlled by a Wall Street clique; and that any man who could not earn a good living for his family had a moral right to shoot a millionaire.  For the most part, Cousin Tryphena counted her tatting stitches and paid not the least attention to her malcontent neighbor.  When she did listen, she did not believe a word he said.  She had lived in Hillsboro for fifty-five years and she knew what made people poor.  It was shiftlessness.  There was always plenty of work to be had at the brush-back factory for any man who had the sense and backbone to keep at it.  If they would stop work in deer-week to go hunting, or go on a spree Town-meeting day, or run away to fish, she’d like to know what business they had blaming millionaires because they lost their jobs.  She did not expound her opinions of these points to Jombatiste because, in the first place, she despised him for a dirty Canuck, and, secondly, because opinions seemed shadowy and unsubstantial things to her.  The important matters were to make your starch clear and not to be late to church.

It is proverbial that people who are mostly silent often keep for some time a reputation for more wisdom than is theirs.  Cousin Tryphena unconsciously profited in the estimation of her neighbor by this fact of psychology.  Old Jombatiste had thundered his per cents. of the distribution of capital for many months before he discovered that he was on the wrong track.

Then, one winter day, as Cousin Tryphena was hanging out her washing, he ran over to her, waving his favorite magazine.  He read her a paragraph from it, striking the paper occasionally for emphasis with his horny, 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.