“Isn’t it a perfect shame?” Mrs. Makely demanded. “I think some of you gentlemen ought to say something. What will Mr. Homos think of our civilization if we let such interruptions go unrebuked?” She was sitting between the banker and myself, and her indignation made him laugh more and more. “Oh, it serves him right,” he said. “Don’t you see that he is hoist with his own petard? Let him alone. He’s in the hands of his friends.” The Altrurian waited for the tumult to die away, and then he said, gently: “I don’t understand.” The old farmer jerked himself to his feet again. “It’s like this: I paid my dolla’ to hear about a country where there wa’n’t no co’perations nor no monop’lies nor no buyin’ up cou’ts; and I ain’t agoin’ to have no allegory shoved down my throat, instead of a true history, noways. I know all about how it is _here_. Fi’st, run their line through your backya’d, and then kill off your cattle, and keep kerryin’ on it up from cou’t to cou’t, till there ain’t hide or hair on ‘em left--” “Oh, set down, set down! Let the man go on! He’ll make it all right with you,” one of the construction gang called out; but the farmer stood his ground, and I could hear him through the laughing and shouting keep saying something, from time to time, about not wanting to pay no dolla’ for no talk about co’perations and monop’lies that we had right under our own noses the whole while, and, you might say, in your very bread-troughs; till, at last, I saw Reuben Camp make his way toward him, and, after an energetic expostulation, turn to leave him again. Then he faltered out, “I guess it’s all right,” and dropped out of sight in the group he had risen from. I fancied his wife scolding him there, and all but shaking him in public. “I should be very sorry,” the Altrurian proceeded, “to have any one believe that I have not been giving you a _bona fide_ account of conditions in my country before the Evolution, when we first took the name of Altruria in our great, peaceful campaign against the Accumulation. As for offering you any allegory or travesty of your own conditions, I will simply say that I do not know them well enough to do so intelligently. But, whatever they are, God forbid that the likeness which you seem to recognize should ever go so far as the desperate state of things which we finally reached. I will not trouble you with details; in fact, I have been afraid that I had already treated of our affairs too abstractly; but, since your own experience furnishes you the means of seizing my meaning, I will go on as before.