One day in passing the local poor-farm (and this is of my own knowledge), he came upon a man beating a poor idiot with a whip.  The latter was incapable of reasoning and therefore of understanding why it was that he was being beaten.  The two were beside a wood-pile and the demented one was crying.  In a moment the old patriarch had jumped out of his conveyance, leaped over the fence, and confronted the amazed attendant with an uplifted arm.

“Not another lick!” he fairly shouted.  “What do you mean by striking an idiot?”

“Why,” explained the attendant, “I want him to carry in the wood, and he won’t do it.”

“It is not his place to bring in the wood.  He isn’t put here for that, and in the next place he can’t understand what you mean.  He’s put here to be taken care of.  Don’t you dare strike him again.  I’ll see about this, and you.”

Knowing his interrupter well, his position and power in the community, the man endeavored to explain that some work must be done by the inmates, and that this one was refractory.  The only way he had of making him understand was by whipping him.

“Not another word,” the old man blustered, overawing the county hireling.  “You’ve done a wrong, and you know it.  I’ll see to this,” and off he bustled to the county courthouse, leaving the transgressor so badly frightened that whips thereafter were carefully concealed, in this institution at least.  The court, which was held in his home town, was not in session at the time, and only the clerk was present when he came tramping down the aisle and stood before the latter with his right hand uplifted in the position of one about to make oath.

“Swear me,” he called solemnly, and without further explanation, as the latter stared at him.  “I want you to take this testimony under oath.”

The clerk knew well enough the remarkable characteristics of his guest, whose actions were only too often inexplicable from the ground point of policy and convention.  Without ado, after swearing him, he got out ink and paper, and the patriarch began.

“I saw,” he said, “in the yard of the county farm of this county, not over an hour ago, a poor helpless idiot, too weak-minded to understand what was required of him, and put in that institution by the people of this county to be cared for, being beaten with a cowhide by Mark Sheffels, who is an attendant there, because the idiot did not understand enough to carry in wood, which the people have hired Mark Sheffels to carry in.  Think of it,” he added, quite forgetting the nature of his testimony and that he was now speaking for dictation and not for an audience to hear, and going off into a most scorching and brilliant arraignment of the entire system in which such brutality could occur, “a poor helpless idiot, unable to frame in his own disordered mind a single clear sentence, being beaten by a sensible, healthy brute too lazy and trifling to perform the duties for which he was hired and which he personally is supposed to perform.”