When Cæsar expressed a preference for being the first man in a village, over a second-fiddle job in Rome, he probably never reflected how much it would rile him if he should happen to find out that there was just as big a man in the next village who didn’t know Cæsar from a cheese-cake; yet that is the poor limitation of local bigness. Great is Mr. Way in Wayback, and great is Mr. Hay in Hayville; but what is Mr. Way in Hayville, and what is Mr. Hay in Wayback? Two nothings, two casual strangers, with no credit, with no say-no, two mere chunks of humanity whose value to the community is strictly proportionate to the size of their greenback wads, and the laxity or tenacity of their several grips thereon. At nine o’clock that night two local Cæsars, in two towns but a score of miles from each other, donned the ermine of power, waved the sceptre of authority, and told their pale-faced but devoted followers that “SOMETHING had got to be done about IT.” The “IT,” of course, was an “OUTRAGE”--it always is when something has got to be done about it, and the something generally means just about nothing. In the front parlor of his large mansard-roof residence, Mr. Bodger--Mr. Theophilus Scranton Bodger, prominent manufacturer, pillar of the Church, candidate for the mayoralty, and general all around magnate and muldoon of Bunker’s Mills, sat amid surroundings of much elegance, black walnut, gilt, plush and hand-painted tidies, and slapping a broad palm with a burly fist, told Mr. Stalls, Mr. Wilkins and Mrs. Bodger that something had got to be done about it. At the same moment, in the Sunday School room of the Baptist Church in Ellenville South Farms, Mr. Manfred Lusk Hackfeather, theological student, Sunday School superintendent, social leader and idol of the ladies in Ellenville South Farms, told six fluttering feminine things, who gazed at him in affectionate awe, that something had got to be done about it. [Illustration] Mr. Bodger’s business was making socks. Mr. Hackfeather may have been wearing a pair of socks of Mr. Bodger’s make at that very instant, yet had he never heard of Bodger; nor did Mr. Bodger know that any part of his growing business was built up on the money of a man named Hackfeather. * * * * *