“Oh! there you are!” the nonresistant quickly replied, “establishing by your acts what you have not courage to acknowledge with your lips.”  Wounded in his feelings, the little deformed man turned away, and commenced inquiring what I thought about several learned, but very heavy reviews that had recently appeared in Putnam’s Magazine, a monthly so sensitive of its character for weighty logic, that it never gave ordinary readers anything they could digest.  I confessed I was not sufficiently qualified to speak on the subject; to do which, required that a man be a member of that mutual admiration society, beyond whose delicate fingers it seldom circulated.  The nonresistant evidently saw my embarrassment, and saying he had but one more question to ask respecting the man Crabbe, continued in the following manner, while Giles Sheridan remained doggedly silent.  “Now, look a here! if your Mr. Crabbe had a bin a farmer who had grown a nice field of wheat, which his neighbor’s horse, being breachy, had got into, wanting to get the best of that neighbor, would he have killed the horse, or would he have gone to that neighbor and said, ’Neighbor, thy horse is in my wheat, pray come and take him out, that I may not bear thee malice?’” This question, and the quaint manner in which it was put, so conciliated the little deformed man that he could not resist a smile.  “I have you there!” exclaimed the nonresistant with a toss of his head.

“It occurs to me that Crabbe never had a farm, hence it would not become me to speak for him.  For myself, I had driven the horse out with my dog,” replied the other.

“There you are wrong,” retorted the nonresistant, “for the dog would have destroyed the wheat, and so carried the devil to the heart of the farmer, that he had gone to law, if, indeed, he had not killed the horse, and by so doing lost all power over his adversary.  Whereas, if he had spoken gently of the conduct of the horse, the owner would have been sorely grieved, and set about making good the damage, according to the promptings of his own heart.”

The landlord hearing the nonresistant’s voice, entered the room and ordered him to begone about his business, and seek some better employment than that of hectoring every traveler who chanced to put up at his inn.  But the nonresistant replied that he was not to be insulted by a landlord who professed to keep a temperance house, and sold liquid death daily on the sly; nor would he leave the inn, in which he had a common right, until his own convenience dictated.  This so enraged the landlord, that although he was a little man, he seized the nonresistant by the collar, and would have forced him to leave the premises but that the other proved too strong for him.  Indeed the nonresistant, notwithstanding his principles, had well nigh divested the landlord of his coat, and done serious damage to his face, and was only ejected from the house by the timely assistance of the hostler and the bar tender.