ho think
that in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes
increase.

Pausing at this spot, the stranger so far succeeded in threading his
way, as at last to plant himself just beside the placard, when,
producing a small slate and tracing some words upon if, he held it up
before him on a level with the placard, so that they who read the one
might read the other. The words were these:--

"Charity thinketh no evil."

As, in gaining his place, some little perseverance, not to say
persistence, of a mildly inoffensive sort, had been unavoidable, it was
not with the best relish that the crowd regarded his apparent intrusion;
and upon a more attentive survey, perceiving no badge of authority about
him, but rather something quite the contrary--he being of an aspect so
singularly innocent; an aspect too, which they took to be somehow
inappropriate to the time and place, and inclining to the notion that
his writing was of much the same sort: in short, taking him for some
strange kind of simpleton, harmless enough, would he keep to himself,
but not wholly unobnoxious as an intruder--they made no scruple to
jostle him aside; while one, less kind than the rest, or more of a wag,
by an unobserved stroke, dexterously flattened down his fleecy hat upon
his head. Without readjusting it, the stranger quietly turned, and
writing anew upon the slate, again held it up:--

"Charity suffereth long, and is kind."

Illy pleased with his pertinacity, as they thought it, the crowd a
second time thrust him aside, and not without epithets and some buffets,
all of which were unresented. But, as if at last despairing of so
difficult an adventure, wherein one, apparently a non-resistant, sought
to impose his presence upon fighting characters, the stranger now moved
slowly away, yet not before altering his writing to this:--

"Charity endureth all things."

Shield-like bearing his slate before him, amid stares and jeers he moved
slowly up and down, at his turning points again changing his inscription
to--

"Charity believeth all things."

and then--

"Charity never faileth."

The word charity, as originally traced, remained throughout uneffaced,
not unlike the left-hand numeral of a printed date, otherwise left for
convenience in blank.

To some observers, the singularity, if not lunacy, of the stranger was
heightened by his muteness, and, perhaps also, by the contrast to his
proceedings afforded in the actions--quite i