“Ask your druggist; ask Moulton!” I said. “They’ll tell you. Most of the children are either doped or stimulated with patent medicines. Besides this, there are a dozen or two downright morphine fiends. Dr. Wentworth is responsible for that.” “Dr. Wentworth!” he exclaimed. “That is a very serious charge, Mr. Carleton. Dr. Wentworth has been practicing here for almost forty years.” “More’s the pity,” I said. “He belongs back in the dark ages. I went to him myself with a touch of neuralgia and he prescribed morphine before I’d been in his office fifteen minutes. It’s become a habit with him just because it’s the simplest way of relieving pain. However, those are details. They don’t account for the general lethargy, for the decaying orchards, for the waste land and wasted opportunities which are lying all around your parish. Now, to take another tack for a moment--did it ever strike you as significant that every foreign-born settler who has come here during the last ten years is waxing fat and prosperous?” “I’ve seen very little of the foreign element,” he said. “Why?” He smiled weakly. “They are hardly of us,” he said, “either in faith or standards. It has always seemed to me a pity that they should have found their way here.” I became heated at that. “Pity!” I exclaimed. “It’s the one ray of hope in this whole blessed village. They came here and are coming here with the old-time spirit of the men who founded this town. They are adventurers--pioneers. They come here fresh, eager, earnest, with simple tastes and simple standards. They are making good and they are going to continue to make good until--mark my words--they own not only this town but all New England.” He sat up at this. “It’s a fact,” I said. “Look around you. It’s clear as daylight. On the one hand we have the old stock, either abandoning their farms or dying upon them; on the other we have the newcomers pressing in with the eagerness of explorers, taking up these farms and bringing them to life. Why, this is Eden to them. Where they came from they’ve been making a living off bits of soil that we wouldn’t build a pigsty on, and here they have acres for the asking. Look at Dardoni; look at Tony; look at the dozen others. They are settling this country anew in exactly the same spirit that our ancestors did. And they are going to win in the same fashion. They are going to drive these shiftless remnants before them exactly as our forefathers drove off the Indians. We think Columbus discovered this country in 1492 once for all, when it’s really being discovered now before our face and eyes. We think this country was settled by the Pilgrims, when as a matter of fact the real settling is going on to-day.”