An embarrassment arose almost at the outset through the discovery that five or six of the men present thought Thessaly was getting on very well as it was, and had assumed that the meeting was called for the purpose of arranging a citizens’ movement to run the coming spring elections for trustees in the interest of good government--by which they of course understood that they were to be asked to take office. The exposure of this mistake threatened for a little time to wreck the purpose of the gathering. Mr. Jones, a gentleman who made matches, or rather had just taken a handsome sum from the great Ruby Loco-foco Trust as his reward for ceasing to manufacture them, was especially disposed to resent what Reuben said about the moral and material state of the village. He insisted that it was the busiest and most progressive town in that whole section of the State; it had six streets well paved, was lighted with gas, had no disorderly houses to speak of, and turned out an annual production of manufactures worth two and a half times as much as the industrial output of any other place of its size in the State. He had the figures at his tongue’s end, and when he finished with a spirited sentence about being proud of his native town, and about birds fouling their own nests, it looked as if he had the sense of the little assemblage with him. Reuben Tracy found it somewhat difficult to reply to an unexpected attack of this nature. He was forced to admit the truth of everything his critic had said, and then to attempt once more to show why these things were not enough. Father Chance, the Catholic priest, a broad-shouldered, athletic young man, who preached very commonplace sermons but did an enormous amount of pastoral work, took up the speaking, and showed that his mind ran mainly upon the importance of promoting total abstinence. John Fairchild, the editor and owner of Thessaly’s solitary daily paper, a candid and warmhearted man, whose heterodoxy on the tariff question gave concern to the business men of the place, but whose journal was honest and popular, next explained what his views were, and succeeded in precipitating, by some chance remark, a long, rambling, and irrelevant debate on the merits of protection and the proper relations between capital and labor. To illustrate his position on these subjects, and on the general question of Thessaly’s condition, Mr. Burdick, the cashier of the Dearborn County Bank, next related how he was originally opposed to the Bland Silver bill, and detailed the mental processes by which his opinion had finally become reversed. The Rev. Dr. Turner, the rector of St. Matthew’s, a mildly paternal gentleman, who seemed chiefly occupied by the thought that he was in the same room with a Catholic priest, tentatively suggested a bazaar, with ladies and the wives of workingmen mingled together on the committee, and smiled and coughed confusedly when this idea was received in absolute silence.