by that time, if I load as fast as thee tells me I
can, why, Robin, my boy, it will go hard for thee and me
when the day of the assizes comes. They will put
handcuffs on thy poor old mother and on thee, and if they
do not send thee to Jack Ketch, they will send thee to
Bloomingdale."

I could not but see that there was sense in what she
said. Anyway, it cooled me down for the time, and I
kissed her and went to my work less eager, and, indeed,
less anxious, than I had been the night before. As I
went down-town in the car, I had a chance to ask myself
what right I had to take away the lives of these poor
savages of the neighborhood merely because they entered
on my possessions. Was it their fault that they had not
been apprenticed to carpenters? Could they help
themselves in the arrangements which had left them
savages? Had any one ever given them a chance to fence
in an up-town lot? Was it, in a word, I said to myself--
was it my merit or my good luck which made me as good as
a landed proprietor, while the Fordyce heirs had their
education? Such thoughts, before I came to my shop, had
quite tamed me down, and when I arrived there I was quite
off my design, and I concluded that I had taken a wrong
measure in my resolution to attack the savages, as I had
begun to call men who might be merely harmless loafers.

It was clearly not my business to meddle with them
unless they first attacked me. This it was my
business to prevent; if I were discovered and attacked,