But though Eustace often tried to get speech with the young man in a casual and incidental way, he never succeeded in doing so. He went to the farm from time to time and made himself pleasant to the farmer and his family. He walked about the place, and chatted as occasion served with the broad-faced, soft-spoken labourers, who grinned at any small sally he might make, and looked bland, though deferential, if he spoke of matters beyond their ken, as he had a way of doing tentatively, although with an object in view. He began to be talked of as a man with something in his head that was quite unfathomable. All agreed that he was an affable young gentleman, and well-spoken and friendly; but the rustics were shy of him nevertheless, and his chief friends were made amongst the bold and lawless fisher and smuggling folks down in the cluster of hovels beneath the shelter of the cliff. They were more or less at war with the law as it was--at least with the excise laws, which were the only ones about which they knew or cared a halfpenny; and it was easy to convince them that there was something rotten in the present system of administering the law generally, and that the people must combine to insist on a reformation. But even whilst winning grunts and snorts of approval from these rough fellows, Eustace felt that his mind and theirs were really poles asunder, and that the lawlessness they looked upon as the embodiment of welfare and happiness was an altogether different thing from that beautiful justice, law, and order which he strove to believe was to come into the world when his doctrines had leavened and fermented and taken shape. Sometimes he was almost disheartened with his want of success, wondering whether this doctrine of discontent were a wise one to instil into the minds of these wild, fierce fisher-folk. Some of the conclusions they drew from his teaching startled him not a little, as when one of them remarked that, since the great folks were so tyrannical and wicked and selfish, it would be no more that right and a just judgment to lure them to their death by false lights some stormy night, that their goods might fall a prey to the suffering poor; and this savage suggestion was hailed with such enthusiasm that Eustace was sternly horrified, and spoke with terse eloquence against any such wickedness, only to find, as other teachers and orators have found before him, that though it was easy to convince men of the truth of a doctrine towards which they were predisposed, it was altogether another matter to hinder them from deductions altogether false, and foreign to the matter in hand, when these also were to their liking; and that they were far less patient in listening to words that opposed these deductions than they had been to those which suggested them.