Soon after we moved to the country we became eligible to join the Westchester County Despair Association, on account of an artesian well—or, to be exact, on account of three artesian wells, complicated with several springs.

I spoke some pages back of the Westchester County Despair Association, which was founded by George Creel and which has a large membership in our immediate section. As I stated then, any city-bred man who turns amateur farmer and moves into our neighborhood, and who in developing his country place has a streak of hard labor, is eligible to join this organization. And sooner or later—but as a general thing sooner—all the urbanites who settle up our way do join. Some day we shall be strong enough to club in and elect our own county officers on a ticket pledged to run a macadam highway past the estate of each member.

Our main claim to qualification was based upon the water question; and yet at the outset it appeared to us that lack of water would be the very least of our troubles. When we took title to our abandoned farm, and for the first time explored the bramble-grown valley leading up from the proposed site of our house to the woodland, we several times had to wade, and once or twice thought we should have to swim. Why, we actually congratulated ourselves upon having acquired riparian rights without paying for them.

This was in the springtime; and the springs along the haunches of the hills upon either side of the little ravine were speaking in burbly murmuring voices, like overflowing mouths, as they spilled forth their accumulated store of the melted snows of the winter before; and the April rainstorms had made a pond of every low place in the county.

In our ignorance we assumed that, since there was now plenty of water of Nature's furnishing, there always would be plenty of water forthcoming from the same prodigal source—more water than we could possibly ever need unless we opened up a fresh-water bathing beach in the lower meadow of our place. So we dug out and stoned up the uppermost spring, which seemed to have the most generous vein of them all, and put in pipes. The lay of the land and the laws of gravity did the rest, bringing the flow downgrade in a gurgling comforting stream, which poured day and night without cessation.

This detail having been attended to, we turned our attention to other things. Goodness knows there were plenty of things requiring attention. I figured at that period of our pioneering work that if we got into the Despair Association at all it would follow as the result of my being indicted for more or less justifiable manslaughter in having destroyed an elderly gentleman of the vicinity, whom upon the occasion of our first meeting I rechristened as Old Major Gloom, and of whom we still speak behind his back by that same name.

The major lived a short distance from us, within easy walking distance, and he speedily proved that he was an easy walker. I shall not forget the first day he came to call. He ambled up a trail that the previous tenants, through a chronic delusion, had insisted upon calling a road; and he found me up to my gills in the midst of the preliminary job of trying to decide where we should make a start at clearing out the jungle, which once upon a time, probably back in the Stone Age, as nearly as we might judge from its present condition, had been the house garden.

We had been camping on the place only a few days. We climbed over, through and under mystic mazes of household belongings to get our meals, or to get to our beds, or to get anywhere, and altogether were existing in a state of disorder that might be likened to the condition the Germans created with such thoroughgoing and painstaking efficiency when falling back from an occupied French community.

I trust we are not lacking in hospitality; but, for the moment, we were in no mood to receive visitors. However, upon first judgment the old major's appearance was such as to disarm hostility and re-arouse the slumbering instincts of cordiality. He was of a benevolent aspect, with fine white whiskers and an engaging manner. If you can imagine one of the Minor Prophets, who had stepped right out of the Old Testament, stopping en route at a ready-made clothing store, you will have a very fair mental picture of the major as he looked when he approached me, with hand outstretched, and in warm tones bade me welcome to Upper Westchester. He fooled me; he would have fooled anybody unless possibly it were an expert criminologist, trained at discerning depravity when masked behind a pleasing exterior.

When he spoke I placed him with regard to his antecedents, for I had been on the spot long enough to recognize the breed to which he belonged. There is a type of native-born citizen of this part of New York State who comes of an undiluted New England strain, being the descendant of pioneering Yankees who settled along the lower Hudson Valley after the Revolution and immediately started in to trade the original Dutch settlers out of their lands and their eyeteeth.

The subsequent generations of this transplanted stock have preserved some of the customs and many of the idioms of their stern and rock-bound forebears; at the same time they have acquired most of the linguistic eccentricities of the New York cockney. Except that they dwell in proximity to it, they have nothing in common with the great city that is only thirty or forty miles away as the motorist flies. Generally they profess a contempt for New York and all its works. They may not visit it once a year; but, all the same, its influence has crept up through the hills to tincture their mode of speech with queer distinctive modes of pronunciation.

The result is a composite dialectic system not to be found anywhere else except in this little strip of upland country and in certain isolated communities over on Long Island, along the outer edge of the zone of metropolitan life and excitement. For instance, a member of this race of beings will call a raspberry a “rosbry”; and he will call a bluebird a “blubbud,” thereby displaying the inherited vernacular of the Down East country. He will say “oily” when he means early, and “early” when he means oily, and occasionally he will even say “yous” for you—peculiarities which in other environment serve unmistakably to mark the born-and-bred Manhattanite.

The major at once betrayed himself as such a person. He introduced himself, adding that as a neighbor he had felt it incumbent to call. I removed a couple of the family portraits and a collection of Indian relics and a few kitchen utensils, and one thing and another, from the seat of a chair, and begged him to sit down and make himself at home, which he did. He accepted a cigar, which I fished out of a humidor temporarily tucked away beneath a roll of carpet; and we spoke of the weather, to which he gave a qualified and cautious indorsement. Then, without further delay, he hitched his chair over and laid a paternal hand upon my arm.

“I hear you've got Blank, the lawyer, searching out the title to your propputty here.”

“Yes,” I said; “Mr. Blank took the matter in hand for us. Fine man, isn't he?”

“Well, some people think so,” he said with an emphasis of profound significance.

“Doesn't everybody think so?” I inquired. “Listen,” he said; “my motto is, Live and let live. And, anyhow, I'm the last man in the world to go round prejudicing a newcomer against an old resident. Now I've just met you and, on the other hand, I've known Blank all my life; in fact, we're sort of related by marriage—a relative of his married a relative of my wife's. So, of course, I've got nothing to say to you on that score except this—and I'm going to say it to you now in the strictest confidence—if I was doing business with Blank I'd be mighty, mighty careful, young man.”

“You astonish me,” I said. “Mr. So-and-So”—naming a prominent business man of the county seat—“recommended his firm to me.”

“Oh, So-and-So, eh? I wonder what the understanding between those two is? Probably they've hatched up something.”

“Why, isn't So-and-So above suspicion?” I asked. “I wouldn't say he was and I wouldn't say he wasn't. But, just between you and me, I'd think twice about taking any advice he gave me. They tell me you've let the contract for some work to Dash & Space?”

“Yes; I gave them one small job.”

“Too bad!”

“What's too bad?”

“You'll be finding out for yourself before you're done; so I won't say anything more on that subject neither. I could tell you a good deal about those fellows if I was a-mind to; but I never believed in repeating anything behind a man's back I wouldn't say to his face. Live and let live!—that's my motto. Anyhow, if you've already signed up with Dash & Space it's too late for you to be backing out—but keep your eyes open, young man; keep your eyes wide open. Who's your architect going to be?”

I told him. He repeated the name in rather a disappointed fashion.

“Never heard of him,” he admitted; “but I take it he's like the run of his kind of people. I never yet saw the architect that I'd trust as far as I could sling him by the coat-tails. Say, ain't that Bink's delivery wagon standing over yonder in front of your stable?”

“I think so. We've been buying some things from Bink.”

“You've opened up a regular account with him, then?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I wouldn't reflect on Bink's honesty for any amount of money in the world. Of my own knowledge I don't know anything against him one way or the other. Of course, from time to time I've heard a lot of things that other people said about him; but that's only hearsay evidence, and I make it a rule not to repeat gossip about anybody. Still”—he lingered over the word—“still, if it was me instead of you, I'd go over his bills very carefully—that's all!

“I don't blame any fellow for trying to get along in his business; and I guess the competition is so keen in the retail merchandising line that oncet in a while a man just naturally has to skin his customers a little. But that's no argument why he should try to take the entire hide off of 'em. They tell me Bink's bookkeeper is a regular wizard when it comes to making up an account, 'specially for a stranger.” He took a puff or two at his cigar, meantime squinting across our weed-grown fields. “Don't I see 'Lonzo Begee chopping dead trees down there alongside the road?”

“Yes; I believe that's his name. He only came to work for us this morning. Seems to be a hustler.”

“Does he, now? Well, ain't it a curious circumstance how many fellers starting in at a new job just naturally work their heads off and wind up at the end of the second week loafing? Strikes me that's particularly the case with the farm laborers round here. Now you take 'Lonzo Begee's case. He never worked for me—I'm mighty careful about who I hire, lemme tell you!—but it always struck me as a strange thing that 'Lonzo changes jobs so often. I make it a point to keep an eye on what's happening in this neighborhood; and seems like every time I run acrost him he's working in a different place for a different party.

“And yet you never can tell—he might turn out to be a satisfactory hand for you. Stranger things have happened. And besides, what suits one man don't suit another. I believe in letting a man find out about these things for himself. The bitterer the experience and the more it costs him, the more likely he is to remember the lesson and profit by it. Don't you think so yourself?”

I told him I thought so; and presently he took his departure, after remarking that we had purchased a place with a good many possibilities in it; though, from what he had heard, we probably paid too much for it, and he only hoped we didn't waste too much money in developing. He left me filled with so many doubts and so many misgivings that I felt congested. Within two days he was back, though, still actuated by the neighborly spirit, to warn me against a few more persons with whom we had already had dealings, or with whom we expected to have dealings, or with whom conceivably we might some day have dealings.

And within a week after that he returned a third time to put me on my guard against one or two more individuals who somehow had been overlooked by him in his previous visits. Rarely did he come out in the open and accuse anybody of anything. He was too crafty, too subtle for that. The major was a regular sutler. But he certainly did understand the art of planting the poison. Give him time enough, and he could destroy a fellow's confidence in the entire human race.

He specialized in no single direction; his gifts were ample for all emergencies. When he tired of making you distrustful of those about you, or when temporarily he ran out of material, he knew the knack of making you distrustful of your own judgment. For example, there was the time, in the second month of our acquaintance I think it was, when he meandered in to inspect the work of renovation that had just been started on the stable. He spent perhaps ten minutes going over the premises, now and then uttering low, disparaging, clucking sounds under his breath. I followed him about fearsomely. I was distressed on account of the disclosures that I felt would presently be forthcoming.

“Putting on a slate roof, eh?” he said when he was done with the investigation. “Expect it to stay put?”

I admitted that such had been the calculation of the builder.

“Nothing like being one of these here optimists,” he commented dryly. “But I want to tell you that it's the biggest mistake you ever made to put a slate roof on those sloping gables without sticking in some metal uprights to keep the snow from sliding off in a lump when the winter thaws come.”

It had always seemed to me that snow had few enough pleasures as it was. Though I had given the subject but little thought, it appeared to me that if sliding off a roof gave the snow any satisfaction it would ill become me or any one else to interfere. I ventured to say as much.

“I guess you don't get my meaning,” he explained. “When the snow starts sliding, if there's enough of it, it's purty sure to take most of those slates along with it. And then where'll you be, I want to know?”

“Is—is it too late to put up some anti-sliding thingumbobs now?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” he said comfortingly; “it's too late now unless you ripped the whole job off and started all over again. I judge you'll just have to let Nature take its course. I see you've got a chimney that don't come over the ridge of the roof. Are you calculating that it'll draw?”

“I rather hoped it would—that was the intention, I believe.”

“Well, then, you're in for another disappointment there. But if I was you I shouldn't fret myself about that, because it'll be some months yet before you'll be building a fire in the fireplace, what with the warm weather just coming on; and you can have the top of the chimney lifted almost any time.... I don't want to alarm you needlessly; but it looks to me like mighty faulty drainpipes the plumber's been putting in for you. You'll have to snatch all that out before a great while and have new pipes put in proper. Don't it beat all what sharpers plumbers are? But then, they're no worse than other artisans, taking them by and large. F'r instance, what could be a worse job than that plastering in your bedroom, or those tin gutters up yonder at your eaves? The plastering may stay up a while, but the first good hard storm ought to bring the gutters down. I don't like your masonry work, either, if you're asking me for my opinion; and I see the carpenters are slipping in some mighty sorry-looking flooring on you.”

I am not exaggerating. I am repeating, as accurately as I can, a conversation that really took place.

For a while the major was in a fair way to spoil the present century for me. If the inhabitants of the countryside were in a conspiracy to strip the pelfry off a fresh arrival and divide it among them as souvenirs, if there was no honesty left anywhere in a corrupted world, what, then, was the use of living? Why not commit suicide according to one of the standard methods and have done with the struggle, trusting that the undertaker would not be too much of a gouge and that the executors of the estate would leave a trifle of it for the widow and the orphan?

But, after a spell, during which from the various firms, corporations and persons who had been traduced by him we uniformly had considerate and fair and scrupulously honorable treatment and service, we began to disregard the major's danger signals and to steer right past them. He, though, wearied not in well-doing. At every chance he dropped in, a poison viper disguised as a philanthropist, to hang another red light on the switch for us. It was inevitable that his ministrations should get on our nerves. I began to have visions centering about justifiable acts of homicide, always with the major for the chosen victim of my violence.

It was after having such a dream that I figured myself as getting into George Creel's Despair Association by virtue of having to stand trial over at White Plains for murder. As a matter of fact, I spared the major; and at last accounts he was still going to and fro in the land, planting slanders on all likely sites. I take it that there is one counterpart for him among every so many human beings; but it is in the country where every one has a chance to find out every one's business, and where the excuses of being neighborly and friendly give him opportunity for plying his trade that he is most in evidence.