"I ain't nothin' 'gainst Mis' Googe as a woman, but she played me a mean trick when she sold that first quarry. It killed my trade as dead as a door nail. You can't hire them highflyers to put themselves into a town their money's bankin' on to ruin in what you might call a summer-social way. I found _that_ out 'fore they left this house last week." "Yes, and she's played a meaner one now." Mr. Wiggins made the assertion with asperity and looked at the same time directly at Octavius Buzzby. "I know all about their free dispensaries that'll draw trade away from my very counter and take the bread and butter out of my mouth; and as for the fees--there won't be a chance for recording a homestead site; there isn't any counting on such things, for they're a homeless lot, always moving from pillar to post with free pickings wherever they locate over night, just like the gypsies that came through here last September." "It's kinder queer now, whichever way you've a mind to look at it," Joel Quimber remarked meditatively. His eyes were cast up to the ceiling; his fore-fingers and thumbs formed an acute triangle over the bridge of his nose; the arms of his chair supported his elbows. "Queer thet it's allus them upper tens an' emigrants thet keep a-movin' on, fust one place then t'other. Kinder looks ez if, arter all, there warn't no great real difference when it comes to bein' restless. Take us home folks now, we're rooted in deep, an' I guess if we was to be uprooted kinder suddin', p'raps we'd hev more charity for the furriners. There's no tellin'; I ain't no jedge of sech things, an' I'm an out-an-out American. But mebbe my great-great-great-granther's father could hev' told ye somethin' wuth tellin'; he an' the Champneys was hounded out of France, an' was glad 'nough to emigrate, though they called it refugeein' an' pioneerin' in them days." Augustus Buzzby laid his hand affectionately on the old man's shoulder. "You're a son of the soil, Joel; I stand corrected. I guess the less any of us true blue Americans say 'bout flinging stones at furriners the safer 'twill be for all on us." But Mr. Wiggins continued his diatribe: "There ain't no denying it, the first people in town are down on the whole thing. Didn't the rector tell me this very day that 'twas like ploughing up the face of nature for the sake of sowing the seeds of political and social destruction--his very words--in this place of peace and happy homes? He don't blame Mrs. Champney for feeling as she does 'bout Aurora Googe. He said it was a shame that just as soon as Mrs. Champney had begun to sell off her lake shore lands so as her city relatives could build near her, Mrs. Googe must start up and balk all her plans by selling two hundred acres of old sheep pasture for the big quarry."