Ned, and see--perhaps I may come to like the stranger more when I
know him better."

"You'll never like him. I see it in the fellow's eye; but just as
you please about going nome. You're right in one thing--never to
give up your own dunghill, so long as you can get room on it for a
fair fling with your enemy. Besides, you can see better, by going
home, what the chap's after. I don't see why he should come here
to learn to preach. We can't support a preacher. We don't want
one. He could just as well have learned his business, where he came
from."

With these words the cousins separated.

"Now," said Ned Hinkley as he took his own way homeward, in a deeper
fit of abstraction than was altogether usual with him, "now will
Bill Hinkley beat about the bush without bouncing through it, until
it's too late to do anything. He's mealy-mouthed with the woman,
and mealy-mouthed with the man, and mealy-mouthed with everybody.
--quite too soft-hearted and too easy to get on. Here's a stranger
nobody knows, just like some crow from another corn-field, that'll
pick up his provisions from under his very nose, and he doing
nothing to hinder until there's no use in trying. If I don't push
in and help him, he'll not help himself. As for Margaret Cooper,
dang it, I'll court her for him myself. If he's afraid to pop the
question, I ain't; though I'll have to be mighty careful about
the words I use, or she'll be thinking I come on my own hook; and
that would be a mighty scary sort of business all round the house.
Then this stranger. If anybody can look through a stranger here in
Charlemont, I reckon I'm that man. I suspect him already. I think