what to think,
when, little by little, the great men ceased to drive up to the door of
the tannery house, and presently came no more. Coniston sank then from
its proud position as the real capital of the state to a lonely hamlet
among the hills. Coniston, too, was watching the drama, and had had a
better view of the stage than Brampton, and saw some reason presently
for the change in Jethro Bass. Not that Mr. Satterlee told, but such
evidence was bound, in the end, to speak for itself. The Newcastle
Guardian had been read and debated at the store--debated with some heat
by Chester Perkins and other mortgagors; discussed, nevertheless, in a
political rather than a moral light. Then Cynthia had returned home;
her face had awed them by its sorrow, and she had begun to earn her own
living. Then the politicians had ceased to come. The credit belongs to
Rias Richardson for hawing been the first to piece these three facts
together, causing him to burn his hand so severely on the stove that
he had to carry it bandaged in soda for a week. Cynthia Wetherell had
reformed Jethro.

Though the village loved and revered Cynthia, Coniston as a whole did
not rejoice in that reform. The town had fallen from its mighty estate,
and there were certain envious ones who whispered that it had remained
for a young girl who had learned city ways to twist Jethro around
her finger; that she had made him abandon his fight with Isaac D.
Worthington because Mr. Worthington had a son--but there is no use
writing such scandal. Stripped of his power--even though he stripped
himself--Jethro began to lose their respect, a trait tending to prove
that the human race may have had wolves for ancestors as well as apes.
People had small opportunity, however, of showing a lack of respect to
his person, for in these days he noticed no one and spoke to none.

When the lion is crippled, the jackals begin to range. A jackal
reconnoitered the lair to see how badly the lion was crippled, and
conceived with astounding insolence the plan of capturing the lion's
quarry. This jackal, who was an old one, well knew how to round up a
quarry, and fled back over the hills to consult with a bigger jackal,
his master. As a result, two days before March town-meeting day, Mr.
Bijah Bixby paid a visit to the Harwich bank and went among certain
Coniston farmers looking over the sheep, his clothes bulging out in
places when he began, and seemingly normal enough when he had finished.