me entangled.

Shrewdness in the country lad, however, is not commended very highly by
me. It may be that the country boy has been tutored by the most
unscrupulous politicians that ever got out a big vote on a moral
issue--usually the one coined at the mint with unanimous consent and a
cry for more: "In God We Trust." If the country boy has fallen, it may
be that he was blinded by this, so that when he came to the city and
took the prizes he used the same old methods. We find some of these
shrewd country lads with abundant health, close observers, selling their
birthrights here in the sort of deals that were regarded as clever in
up-country politics, and so became legitimate in their eyes.

There's more politics in the country than they can dilute in their
sermons, although they absorb about thirty times as many of these as the
city man. Some day all the country fathers will reform, even if they
have to change their politics and half of them die because of it. They
will think it more worth while to save their sons than to save the
country.

What about the morality of the city man? It isn't a factor because he
isn't.

If the management of our affairs had been entrusted to Gabrielle
Tescheron there would have been no trouble. Had her father been a wise
man and allowed this only child to have her way--to have noted the whole
situation from her fresh view-point, he would have found peace where he
found an abundance of perplexing conditions and ample expense closely
adhering to every bramble bush into which the tactics of Smith hurled
him. Gabrielle could not save him and she did not try. Where the cause
of the trouble is idiocy of the Tescheron quality, it has to go through
a long course of pulverization, maceration and cure; if you hurry the
process, the goods will be sour and hurt the business, if the lot gets
out under the trade-mark. The best thing to do with it is to send it to
the coal heap, for if you try to get your money back at a Front Street
auction room, some hand-cart syndicate will nab it and cut your price.
They'll undersell the direct trade, and when you have finished writing
an explanation to the men on the road, you'd wish you had eaten the
whole carload yourself.

It was part of the wisdom of this remarkably prudent young woman to
thoroughly comprehend--by some of those fresh intuitions, probably--that
her truly repentant father would plead for her forgiveness and ask her
blessing upon his prodigal