folks
think it's the other way, but it ain't.

"Now, J'rome, you look at that old clock there; it was one that
b'longed to old Peter Thomas. I bought it when he broke up an' went
to the poorhouse. Doctor Prescott he foreclosed on him 'bout ten
years ago--you don't remember. He had his old house torn down, an'
sowed the land down to grass. I s'pose I paid more'n the clock was
worth, but I guess it kept the old man in snuff an' terbaccer a
while. Now you look at that clock; watch that pendulum swingin'. Now
s'pose we say the left is poverty--the left is the place for the
goats an' the poor folks that poverty has made goats; an' the right
is riches. See it swing, do ye? It don't no more'n touch poverty
before it's rich; it don't get time to starve an' suffer. It don't no
more'n touch riches before it's poor; it don't have time to forget,
an' git proud an' hard. I tell ye, J'rome, it ain't even division
we're aimin' at; we can't keep that if we get it till we're dead;
it's--balance. We want to keep the time of eternity, jest the way
that clock keeps the time of day."

Jerome looked at the clock and the pendulum swinging dimly behind a
painted landscape on the glass door, and never after saw one without
his uncle's imagery recurring to his mind. Always for him the
pendulum swung into the midst of a cowering throng of beggars on the
left, and into a band of purple-clad revellers on the right. Somehow,
too, Doctor Seth Prescott's face always stood out for him plainly
among them in purple.

Always, sooner or later, Ozias Lamb would seize Doctor Prescott and
Simon Basset as living illustrations and pointed examples of the
social wrongs. "Look at them two men," he would say, "to come down to
this town; look at them. You've heard about cuttle-fishes, J'rome,
'ain't ye?"

Jerome shook his head, as he drew his waxed thread through.

"Well, I'll tell ye what they be. They're an awful kind of fish. I
never see one, but Belinda's brother that was a sailor, I've heard
him tell enough to make your blood run cold. They're all head an'
eyes an' arms. Their eyes are big as saucers, an' they're made just
to see things the cuttle-fishes want to kill; an' they've got a
hundred arms, with suckin' claws on the ends, an' they jest search
an' seek, search an' seek, with them dreadful eyes that ain't got no
life but hate an' appetite, an' they stretch out an' feel, stretch
out an' feel, with them hundred arms, till they git what they want,