But no crowd gathered to listen to the professor. The Mercurials were all on my side of the compound. Thus it was clear to me that my brand of science was more attractive to the little people than the professor’s. While "The Mutability of Newtonian Law" languished for an audience, "The Sandbagger’s Manual" was fast acquiring one that taxed the capacity of the word-box. The professor, for a long time, had been so wrapped up in his attempt to master the Mercurial language that he had paid little heed to me and my efforts. The attention my work was securing, however, finally caused him to sit up and take notice. Halting his weighty remarks, he laid aside his talk machine, came over to my side of the circle, and stood behind me, listening. The first I knew of his presence was the reaching of two angry hands over my head and the snatching away of the instrument on which I was, at that moment, reciting the ten rules for a cracksman’s success. My audience was as greatly put out as I was myself. While I was leaping to my feet and whirling around, my listeners were clamoring on their word-boxes for me to proceed. Professor Quinn, white-faced and in a greater temper than I had ever before seen him, held my talking apparatus over his head and seemed of a mind to clash it down on the earth at his feet. "I say, professor," I called restrainingly, "don’t do anything rash." "Mr. Munn," he gasped, his voice thick with suppressed emotion, "is my confidence in you to be destroyed utterly? I singled you out as one of the worthiest of all those brought from Terra, and yet I find you busily inculcating false ideas of personal property into the keen minds of these Mercurials! For shame, sir! Would you demoralize this planet? Would you turn these law-abiding people into thieves?" "Professor," I answered, "your ideas and mine do not harmonize on this matter of property rights." "While I admit, Mr. Munn," he answered, "that conditions on our own planet in a measure condoned your actions, yet I maintain that you have no right to air your ideas in Njambai. Here the conditions are of an altogether different sort. So far as I have been able to learn, this orb has not fallen under the noxious spell of the monopolists. You have no excuse for instructing the Mercurials in the alpha and omega of your contemptible profession." "Contemptible?" I repeated. "That is a hard term, professor. Besides, they seem to be fond of the instruction. Everybody listens to me, while you haven’t had so much as a corporal’s guard to enjoy that astronomical stuff you have been playing off on your concertina."