t down, finished product fought up; bills due
fought off, accounts fought in; the smallest percentage of a percentage
wrestled for.

Eddie was incapable of such vigilant hostility toward everybody. The
factory almost immediately ceased to pay expenses. Eddie was prompt to
meet debts, but lenient as a collector. The rest of his inheritance
fared no better. Eddie was an ideal mortgagee. The first widow wept him
out of his interest in five tears. Having obliged her, he could hardly
deny the next person, who had money but wanted more, "to carry out a big
deal."

Eddie first gained a reputation for being a kind-hearted gentleman and a
Christian, and later a notoriety for being an easy mark. Eddie overheard
such comment eventually, and it wounded him as deeply as it bewildered
him. Bitterer than the contempt for a hard man is the contempt for a
soft man who is betrayed by a vice of mercy. Eddie was hopelessly
addicted to decency.

Uncle Loren had been a miser and so close that his nickname had implied
the ability to skin a flint. People hated him and raged against him; but
it suddenly became evident that they had worked hard to meet their bills
payable to him. They had sat up nights devising schemes to gain cash for
him. He was a cause of industry and thrift and self-denial. He paid poor
wages, but he kept the factory going. He squeezed a penny until the
eagle screamed, but he made dusters out of the tail feathers, and he was
planning to branch out into whisk brooms and pillows when, in the words
of the pastor, he was "called home." The pastor liked the phrase, as it
did not commit him to any definite habitat.

Eddie, however, though he worked hard and used thrift, and, with
Ellaphine's help, practised self-denial, found that he was not so big a
man as the small man he succeeded. He increased the wages and cut down
the hours, and found that he had diminished the output of everything
except complaints. The men loafed shamelessly, cheated him of the energy
and the material that belonged to him, and whined all the time. His
debtors grew shiftless and contemptuous.

It is the irony, the meanness, of the trade of life that virtue may
prove vicious in effect; and viciousness may produce good fruit. Figs do
grow from thistles.

For a time the Pouch couple attracted a great deal of attention from the
people of Carthage--the sort of attention that people on shore devote to
a pair of capsized canoeists for whom nobody cares to r