Here I’ve got to go home an’ hay, if it is Sunday, to git enough for them dam’ed cows to eat in the winter!  Eight hours!  Hm!  I work eighteen an’ I ‘ain’t got anybody over me to strike again’, ‘cept the Almighty, an’ I ruther guess He wouldn’t make much account of it.  Guess he’d starve me out ef I quit work, and not make much bones of it.  I can stop peddlin’ milk to sech as Carroll, but the milk sours, an’ hanged if I know who suffers most.  Here’s my wife been makin’ dam’ed little pot-cheeses out of the sour milk as ‘tis, and sellin’ ’em for two cents apiece.  They’re hangin’ all over the bushes tied up in little rags.  She’s got to work all day to-day makin’ butter to save the cream, and then I s’pose I’ve got to hustle round and find somebody to give the butter to.  Carroll ain’t the only one.  I wish they all had to work as hard as I do one day for the things they git for nothin’, the whole bilin’ lot of ’em.  He’s the worst, though.  What business did he have settlin’ down on us here in Banbridge, I’d like to know?  If he’d got to steal to feather his nest, why didn’t he go to some other place, confound him?” The milkman’s voice and manner were malignant.

The barber looked at him with some apprehension, but he spoke, still holding his razor aloft.  “Now I rather guess you are jumpin’ at exclusions too hasty, Mr. Tappan,” said he, in an anxiously pacific voice.  “I don’t know about them dividends Mr. Lee’s talkin’ about.  Captain Carroll, he gave me a little dip.”  The barber winked about mysteriously.  “He told me he’d tell me when to come in, and he ain’t told me yet, but I ain’t no disprehension, but he’s all right.  Captain Carroll is a gentleman, he is.”  Flynn’s voice fairly quivered with affectionate championship.  There were tears in his foolish eyes.  He bent over Amidon’s face, which grinned up at him cautiously through the lather.

“Let him pay me them milk-tickets, then, if he’s all right,” Tappan said, viciously.

“He will when he’s disembarrassed and his adventures are on a dividend-paying adipoise,” said the barber, in a tearful voice.

“I think he is all right,” said the druggist.

Then little Willy Eddy added his pipe.  He had been covertly smoothing out Tappan’s crumpled newspaper.  “He’s real nice-spoken,” said he.  “I guess he will come right in time.”

Tappan turned on him and snatched back his newspaper.  “Here, I ain’t done with that,” he said; “I’ve got to take it home to my wife.”  Then he added, “For God’s sake, you little fool, he ain’t been swipin’ anything from you, has he?”

Then the barber arose to the situation.  He advanced, razor in hand.  He strode up to the milkman and stood dramatically before him, arm raised and head thrown back.  “Now, look at here,” he proclaimed, in a high falsetto, “I ain’t agoin’ to hear no asparagusment of my friends, not here in this tonsorial parlor.  No, sir!” There was something at once touching, noble, and absurd about the demonstration.  The others chuckled, then sobered, and watched.