There is naught in all our moral economy which can suffer a change without discredit and disparagement, barring what is known as a change of heart. It is a clumsy and awkward mental evolution at best, as the turncoat in politics, the apologist for discarded friendships, the fickle-minded in religious doctrines, know to their cost. The process of veering is attended invariably with a poignant mortification, as if one had warranted one’s opinions infallible, and to endure till time shall be no more. Tubal Cain Sims experienced all the ignominious sensations known as “eatin’ crow,” as he sought to qualify his satisfaction of the previous evening, and reconcile it to his complete change of sentiment now, without giving his true reason. It would involve scant courtesy to the absent Euphemia to intimate his fears lest she admire too much the juggler, and it might excite ridicule to suggest his certainty that the juggler would admire her far too much. Sometimes, indeed, he doubted if other people--that is, above the age of twenty-five--entertained the rapturous estimate of Euphemia, which was a subject on which he and Jane Ann Sims never differed. “I did,--I did,” he sputtered. “Me an’ Jane Ann nare one never seen no harm in the pay-formance. An’ Jane Ann don’t know nuthin’ contrarious yit, kase I ain’t tole her,--she bein’ a ’oman, an’ liable ter talk free an’ let her tongue git a-goin’; she dunno whar ter stop. A man oughtn’t ter tell his wife sech ez he aims ter go no furder,” he added discursively. “’Thout he wants all the Cove ter be a-gabblin’ over it nex’ day,” assented a husband of three experiments. “I know wimmin. Lawsy massy! I know ’em now.” He shook his head lugubriously, as if his education in feminine quirks and wiles had gone hard with him, and he could willingly have dispensed with a surplusage of learning. “But arter I hearn them strange words,” resumed Tubal Cain Sims,--“them strange words, so painful an’ pitiful-spoken,--I drawed the same idee ez Peter Knowles thar. I ’lowed the juggler war some sort’n evil-doer agin the law,--though he didn’t look like it ter me.” “He did ter me; he featured it from the fust,” Knowles protested, with a stern drawing down of his forbidding face. There was a momentary pause while they all seemed to meditate on the evidence afforded by the personal appearance of the juggler. “I be afeard,” continued Sims, glancing at Knowles, “like Pete say, he hev c’mmitted murder an’ be fleein’ from the law. An’ I be a law-abidin’ citizen--an’--an’--he can’t stay at my house.” There was silence. No one was interested in the impeccability of Tubal Cain Sims’s house. It was his castle. He was free to say who should come and who should go. His own responsibility was its guarantee.