g that I'm a hard man. If that's
so, I'm waking up to the reason for it--your grub has petrified me.
My real friends have noticed it." Here was more of Britt's unwonted
garrulity about his private concerns. "Some of those friends have taken
pity on me. I have been invited to board with the Harnden family."

Mr. Britt did not look around to note the effect of that piece of news.
He gazed complacently up into the sunshine.

He made quite a figure--for Egypt--as he stood there. Mr. Britt had
"togged out." His toupee, when he first flashed it, had signified much.
But the manner in which he had garbed himself for summer was little less
than hardihood, considering the sort of a community in which he
lived. He was "a native." The style of his attire declared that he was
completely indifferent to any comments by his townsmen--and such a trait
exposed in a New England village revealed more fully than his usurious
habits the real callousness of the Britt nature. There was not a man in
sight who did not have patches either fore or aft, or both! Mr. Britt
wore a light, checked suit with a fitted waist, garishly yellow shoes,
a puff tie of light blue, and a sailor straw with a sash band. He was
a peacock in a yard full of brown Leghorns. But nobody laughed at Mr.
Britt. Nobody in Egypt felt like laughing at anything, any more. They
were accepting Britt, in his gorgeous plumage, as merely another strange
item in the list of the signs and wonders that marked the latter days in
Egypt.

More tawdry than ever appeared Prophet Elias's robe in that sunshine,
though his umbrella did seem to comport better with the season. He stood
in front of Usial's home. For a long time he had been keeping his tongue
off the magnate of the town. For some weeks he had been away somewhere.
To those who indulgently asked where he had been he replied tartly that
he had volunteered as a scapegoat for the woes and sins of Egypt, had
gone in search of a wilderness, and had come back because all other
wildernesses were only second-rate affairs compared with the town from
which he had started.

The Prophet seemed to feel that the appearance of Mr. Britt required
comment. He raised his voice and made that comment:

"'And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field,
how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto
you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of
these.'"

The Prophet bestowed a mom