these slow under-currents of feeling, in small communities, for or against
individuals. After they have once become a steady tide, nothing can check
their force or turn their direction. Sometimes they can be traced back to
their spring, as a stream can: one lucky or unlucky word or deed, years
ago, made a friend or an enemy of one person, and that person's influence
has divided itself again and again, as brooks part off and divide into
countless rivulets, and water whole districts. But generally one finds it
impossible to trace the like or dislike to its beginning. A stranger,
asking the reason of it, is answered in an off-hand way,--"Oh,
everybody'll tell you the same thing. There isn't a soul in the town but
hates him;" or, "Well, he's just the most popular man in the town. You'll
never hear a word said against him,--never; not if you were to settle
right down here, and live."

It was months before Stephen realized that there was slowly forming in the
town a dislike to him. He was slow in discovering it, because he had
always lived alone; had no intimate friends, not even when he was a boy.
His love of books and his passionate love of beauty combined with his
poverty to hedge him about more effectually than miles of desert could
have done. His father and mother had lived upon fairly good terms with all
their neighbors, but had formed no very close bonds with any. In the
ordinary New England town, neighborhood never means much: there is a
dismal lack of cohesion to the relations between people. The community is
loosely held together by a few accidental points of contact or common
interest. The individuality of individuals is, by a strange sort of
paradox, at once respected and ignored. This is indifference rather than
consideration, selfishness rather than generosity; it is an unsuspected
root of much of our national failure, is responsible for much of our
national disgrace. Some day there will come a time when it will have
crystallized into a national apathy, which will perhaps cure itself, or