"Well, you're the first man I ever heard talk as you've been doing
about his own country," said the bagman, getting tired and impatient
of being sat on all the time. "'Lives there a man with a soul so
dead, who never said--to--to himself'...I forget the darned thing."

He tried to remember it. The man whose soul was dead cleared his
throat for action, and the driver--for whom the bagman had shouted
twice as against the stranger's once--took the opportunity to observe
that he always thought a man ought to stick up for his own country.

The stranger ignored him and opened fire on the bagman. He proceeded
to prove that that was all rot--that patriotism was the greatest curse
on earth; that it had been the cause of all war; that it was the
false, ignorant sentiment which moved men to slave, starve, and fight
for the comfort of their sluggish masters; that it was the enemy of
universal brotherhood, the mother of hatred, murder, and slavery, and
that the world would never be any better until the deadly poison,
called the sentiment of patriotism, had been "educated" out of the
stomachs of the people. "Patriotism!" he exclaimed scornfully.
"My country! The darned fools; the country never belonged to them,
but to the speculators, the absentees, land-boomers, swindlers, gangs
of thieves--the men the patriotic fools starve and fight for--their
masters. Ba-a!"

The opposition collapsed.

The coach had climbed the terraces on the south side of the river, and
was bowling along on a level stretch of road across the elevated flat.

"What trees are those?" asked the stranger, breaking the aggressive