Copley looked at him now with the respectful sympathy which one might well feel in witnessing the fall of a very great man. He scarcely remembered his own interests, inextricably involved. Every inflection of the mellow, sonorous voice raised to a declamatory pitch found a vibrating acquiescence in chords of responsive emotion. Every unconscious gesture of the massive and imposing figure--as histrionically appropriate as if acquired by labor and tuition, since it was indeed the nature that art simulates--was marked with appreciative eyes. A rat in a trap is hardly esteemed a fit object for sympathy by civilized communities, but consider the aspect and magnitude of the catastrophe to his friends and neighbors, consider the emotional melodrama within the small circuit of the wires! "Don't take it so tur'ble hard, 'Renzo," expostulated Copley, still seated on the floor. For Taft was standing motionless, his eyes staring and fixed, his hat far back on his head, exposing his set, drawn face with its teeth hard clenched, one hand mechanically clutching his flowing yellow beard, the other continually closing and unclosing on the handle of a pistol which he had half drawn from his pocket,--a habit of his in moments of mental perplexity, as if he instinctively appealed to this summary arbiter to decide on questions far enough removed from its jurisdiction. "Don't be so tur'ble desolated; some way out'n it, sure ez ye air born," urged Copley in a consolatory wheeze. The sound of his voice seemed to rouse Taft. He caught himself with a start and turned hastily away, looking about as if in search of something. He took the lantern presently to aid him in this, and when it came back, glimmering through the dusk, he carried a box of tools in the other hand. "Thar's one way out'n it, sure," he said in a muffled, changed voice, "though it's gone powerful hard with me ter git my own cornsent ter take it." He placed the lantern upon the furnace, and, as he went vigorously to work, the astounded Copley, still upon the ground, began to perceive that he was taking the apparatus carefully apart; he was disconnecting the worm from the neck, when his amazed coadjutor found his voice. "Hold on, 'Renzo," he remonstrated; "ye ain't a-goin' ter take the contraption down, surely"-- "Ruther hev the revenuers do it?" said Taft, showing his teeth in a sarcastic smile as he looked up. "They'll make wuss slarter with the worm 'n I will." Then, pausing, with a frown of rancorous reminiscence, "I hed a still o' bigger capacity 'n this one over yander in Persimmon Cove, an' they cut it up in slivers, an' the worm war lef' in pieces no longer 'n that," measuring with both hands, "an' the furnace all tore up. I never seen sech a sight ez whenst I croped back ter view the wreck. I 'lowed I'd never git forehanded enough ter start ter manufacture sperits agin in this worl'."