If an honest selectman gets into office and tries to let out a road contract to a scientific builder, a storm of protest goes up that he is taking away the bread from town labour, and the next year he is so snowed under at the polls that you never hear of him again. He is snowed under with equal effectiveness if he tries to keep town labour up to contract, or tries to take away the vicious drugstore liquor license. Fifty per cent. of our working population are grafters, even when they don't know it. Twenty-five per cent. of our people--the richest taxpayers, who are summer residents--don't care anyhow, so long as they can get men to look after their estates. Also, these rich men are grafters, too, of the worst kind, because they never declare a half of their taxable personal property. Those of us who are left are, as the expressive phrase goes, "up against it." That is what I told Stella as we came home from our first Town Meeting. I was blue, despondent, ready to give up. "Twenty-five per cent. who really cared," said she, "could reform the universe. Reform is like the dictionary--it takes infinite patience. The first thing is to get the 25 per cent. together." "You're right!" I cried, taking heart again. "There's plenty of work for our hands ahead! They think in Bentford that we are mere upstarts because we've lived here only a year or two. But that is just why we can see so many things which must be altered. We've got to keep our batteries on the firing line. We've got plenty of work besides getting these hotbeds ready for the spring planting and uncovering our perennials." We had reached home, and, as I concluded, we were standing by the woodshed contemplating the new hotbed sashes which had not been used the spring before.