onscious lowering of
their standards of honesty. The beginning had been an accident, but the
long sequence was not. For the first time in the history of the library,
the farmer who brought the first load of wood presented a bill for this
service. He charged two dollars a cord on the scrawled memorandum, but
Miss Martin mistook this figure for a seven, corrected his total with the
kindest tolerance for his faulty arithmetic, and gave the countryman a
check which reduced him for a time to a paralyzed silence. It was only on
telling the first person he met outside the library that the richness of a
grown person knowing no more than that about the price of wood came over
him, and the two screamed with laughter over the lady's beautifully formed
figures on the dirty sheet of paper.

Miss Martin took the hesitating awkwardness of the next man presenting
himself before her, not daring to ask the higher price and not willing to
take the lower, for rustic bashfulness, and put him at his ease by saying
airily, "Five cords? That makes thirty-five dollars. I always pay seven
dollars a cord." After that, the procession of grinning men driving
lumber-sleds toward the library became incessant. The minister attempted
to remonstrate with the respectable men of his church for cheating a poor
young lady, but they answered roughly that it wasn't her money but
Camden's, who had tossed them the library as a man would toss a penny to a
beggar, who had now quite forgotten about them, and, finally, who had made
his money none too honestly.

Since he had become of so much importance to them they had looked up his
successful career in the Chicago wheat pit, and, undazzled by the millions
involved, had penetrated shrewdly to the significance of his operations.
The record of his colossal and unpunished frauds had put to sleep, so far
as he was concerned, their old minute honesty. It was considered the best
of satires that the man who had fooled all the West should be fooled in
his turn by a handful of forgotten mountaineers, that they should be
fleecing him in little things as he had fleeced Chicago in great. There
was, however, an element which frowned on this shifting of standards, and,
before long, neighbors and old friends were divided into cliques, calling
each other, respectively, cheats and hypocrites. Hillsboro was intolerably
dull that winter because of the absence of the usual excitement over the
entertainment, and in that stagnation all