Zechariah, 'I will show them no mercy, saith the Lord, but I will
deliver every man into the hand of his neighbor.' Now the baron
business has generally been lucrative, but here in Pointview there
was too much competition. We were all barons. Everybody was
taxin' everybody else for his luxuries, an' nobody could save a
cent--nobody but me an' Eph Hill. He didn't buy any automobiles or
build a new house or send his girl to the seminary. He kept both
feet on the ground, but he put up his prices along with the rest.
By-an'-by Eph had a mortgage on about half the houses in the
village. That showed what was the matter with the other men.

"The merchants all got liver-comlaint. There were twenty men that
I used to see walkin' home to their dinner every day or down to the
postoffice every evenin'. But they didn't walk any more. They
scud along in their automobiles at twenty miles an hour, with the
whole family around 'em. They looked as if they thought that now
at last they were keepin' up with Lizzie. Their homes were empty
most o' the time. The reading-lamp was never lighted. There was
no season o' social converse. Every merchant but Eph Hill grew fat
an' round, an' complained of indigestion an' sick-headache. Sam
looked like a moored balloon. Seemed so their morals grew fat an'
flabby an' shif'less an' in need of exercise. Their morals
travelled too, but they travelled from mouth to mouth, as ye might
say, an' very fast. More'n half of 'em give up church an' went off
on the country roads every Sunday. All along the pike from
Pointview to Jerusalem Corners ye could see where they'd laid
humbly on their backs in the dust, prayin' to a new god an' tryin'
to soften his heart with oil or open the gates o' mercy with a
monkey-wrench.