gnant purpose; and it is not easy to believe
other tales of hardness, of ruthless beating down of opposition, when
one repeatedly comes upon well-authenticated instances in which he has
stood quietly hidden behind the scenes to pull the strings and to make
his neighbors bow and dance and posture in accordance with some schemes
which he has formulated for their greater happiness.

Scattergood loved to meddle. Perhaps that is his dominant trait. He
could see nothing moving in the community about him and withhold his
hand. If Old Man Bogle set about buying a wheelbarrow, Scattergood would
intervene in the transaction; if Pliny Pickett stopped at the Widow
Ware's gate to deliver a message, Scattergood saw an opportunity to
unite lonely hearts--and set about uniting them forthwith; if little Sam
Kettleman, junior, and Wade Lumley's boy, Tom, came to blows,
Scattergood became peacemaker or referee, as the needs of the moment
seemed to dictate. It would be difficult to find a pie in Coldriver
which was not marked by his thumb. So it came about that when he became
convinced that Grandmother Penny was unhappy because of various
restrictions and inhibitions placed on her by her son, the dry-goods
merchant, and by her daughter-in-law, he determined to intervene.
Scattergood was partial to old ladies, and this partiality can be traced
to his earliest days in Coldriver. He loved white hair and wrinkled
cheeks and eyes that had once been youthful and glowing, but were dulled
and dimmed by watching the long procession of the years.

Now he sat on the piazza of his hardware store, his shoes on the
planking beside him, and his pudgy toes wriggling like the trained
fingers of an eminent pianist. It was a knotty problem. An ordinary
problem Scattergood could solve with shoes on feet, but let the matter
take on eminent difficulty and his toes must be given freedom and elbow
room, as one might say. Later in life his wife, Mandy, after he had
married her, tried to cure him of this habit, which she considered
vulgar, but at this point she failed signally.

The facts about Grandmother Penny were, not that she was consciously ill
treated. Her bodily comfort was seen to. She was well fed and reasonably
clothed, and had a good bed in which to sleep. Where she was sinned
against was in this: that her family looked upon her white hair and her
wrinkles and arrived at the erroneous conclusion that her interest in
life was gone--in short, that she w