Behind all this gathering of forces stood an almost unguessed figure.  Not the lovely white-haired lady of the Parish House; not big Westmoreland; not handsome Laurence, nor outspoken Miss Sally Ruth with a suffrage button on her black basque; but a limping man in gray tweeds with a soft felt hat pulled down over his eyes and a butterfly net in his hand.  That net was symbolic.  With trained eye and sure hand the naturalist caught and classified us, put each one in his proper place.

Keener, shrewder far than any of us, no one, save I alone, guessed the part it pleased him to play.  Laurence was hailed as the Joshua who was to lead all Appleboro into the promised land of better paving, better lighting, better schools, better living conditions, better city government—­a better Appleboro.  Behind Laurence stood the Butterfly Man.

He seldom interfered with Laurence’s plans; but every now and then he laid a finger unerringly upon some weak point which, unnoticed and uncorrected, would have made those plans barren of result.  He amended and suggested.  I have seen him breathe upon the dry bones of a project and make it live.  It satisfied that odd sardonic twist in him to stand thus obscurely in the background and pull the strings.  I think, too, that there must have been in his mind, since that morning he had watched the bluejay destroy his nest, some obscure sense of restitution.  Once, in the dark, he had worked for evil.  Still keeping himself hidden, it pleased him now to work for good.  So there he sat in his workroom, and cast filaments here and there, and spun a web which gradually netted all Appleboro.

There was, for instance, the Clarion.  We had had but that one newspaper in our town from time immemorial.  I suppose it might have been a fairly good county paper once,—­but for some years it had spluttered so feebly that one wondered how it survived at all.  In spite of this, nobody in our county could get himself decently born or married, or buried, without a due and proper notice in the Clarion.  To the country folks an obituary notice in its columns was as much a matter of form as a clergyman at one’s obsequies.  It simply wasn’t respectable to be buried without proper comment in the Clarion.  Wherefore the paper always held open half a column for obituary notices and poetry.

These dismal productions had first brought the Clarion to Mr. Flint’s notice.  He used to snigger at sight of the paper.  He said it made him sure the dead walked.  He cut out all those lugubrious and home-made verses and pasted them in a big black scrapbook.  He had a fashion of strolling down to the paper’s office and snipping out all such notices and poems from its country exchanges.  A more ghoulish and fearsome collection than he acquired I never elsewhere beheld.  It was a taste which astonished me.  Sometimes he would gleefully read aloud one which particularly delighted him: