reductions, and getting them, until there was no rent left for anyone to
reduce. The landlord was as good and as poor as our best.

"And while all this was going on Gobstown was surrounded by estates
where there were the most ferocious landlords--rack-renting, absentee,
evicting landlords, landlords as wild as tigers. And these tiger
landlords were leaping at their tenants and their tenants slashing back
at them as best they could. Nothing, my dear, but blood and the music of
grape-shot and shouts in the night from the jungle. In Gobstown we had
to sit down and look on, pretending, moryah, that we were as happy as
the day was long.

"Not a scalp was ever brought into Gobstown. No man of us ever went out
on an adventure which might bring him home again through the mouth of
the county jail. Not a secret enterprise that might become a great
public excitement was ever hatched, not to speak of being launched. We
had not as much as a fife-and-drum band. We did not know how to play a
tin whistle or beat upon the tintinnabulum. We never waved a green flag.
We had not a branch of any kind of a league. We had no men of skill to
draft a resolution, indite a threatening letter, draw a coffin, skull,
and cross-bones, fight a policeman, or even make a speech. We were never
a delegate at a convention, an envoy to America, a divisional executive,
a deputation, or a demonstration. We were nothing. We wilted under the
blight of our good landlord as the green stalk wilts under the frost of
the black night.... Hand me that knife. The one with the wooden handle.

"In desperation we used rouse ourselves and march into the
demonstrations on other estates. We were a small and an unknown tribe.
The Gobstown contingent always brought up the rear of the procession--a
gawky, straggling, bad-stepping, hay-foot, straw-foot lot! The onlookers
hardly glanced at us. We stood for nothing. We had no name. Once we
rigged up a banner with the words on it, 'Gobstown to the Front!' but
still we were put to the back, and when we walked through this town the
servant girls came out of their kitchens, laughed at us, and called out,
'Gobstown to the Back of the Front!'

"The fighting men came to us, took us aside, and asked us what we were
doing in Gobstown. We had no case to make. We offered to bring forward
our good landlord as a shining example, to lead our lamb forward in
order that he might show up the man-eaters on the other estates. The
organisers were