“The peaceful season has come around again,” said Mr. Scraggs. “It does that every year. It is a good thing to have a certain date to be peaceful on; you prepare for it, put all troublesome things away, and wind up, as I usually do, with four friends trying to hold me down because I feel so light in the head. “Peace is one of the finest things on earth, but the makin’ of it will never be confined to one of these here monopolies. Listen! What better could a man do than go into a home being tore wide open by the dissensions and discussions of one husband and one wife, using such domestic articles as flat-irons, coal-scuttles, brooms and the like of that, upon each other, and extract from the dust one large, smooth, round, white hunk of peace? It is nice to think of. “I remember Long John. He was a feller built on the concertina plan. When he sat down in a chair he didn’t look like a man more’n seven feet high, but when he got up, and up, and more up, he was that kind of build that made little Bill holler, the first time he saw the ack, ‘How much more of you is there down cellar?’ And Bill said to me on the quiet: ‘Old Gabe will have to play an oncore if he expects John to get up before the resurrection is all over.’ “But John had a disposition that couldn’t be beat. He was for peace all the time. Bits of men that wouldn’t more’n come up to his waist used to talk to him as rough as they liked and John wouldn’t give them one word back. He simply hit them a slam, and then there was peace, you bet your life. “But it was done out of pure good-natur. ‘They got no business to talk like that to nobody,’ says John, ‘and I can correc’ them without it looking anything like a fight. Ain’t you noticed that that stops ’em from being sassy?’ It sure did, but I lived in fear and tremblin’ some feller would be an inch nearer than John cal’lated and would remain quiet for several million years. That would have broke his heart. “Well, John put in a solid eight months without ever pinting a foot toward town. Then he collected and went off for a little quiet trip on his own hook. He said that nobody could ask for a better people than we were, yet we was kind of rough in our ways, and he wanted to see domestic felicity, and the soothing inflooence of Woman. That there was a strain in his ideas that made him need kind and gentle treatment oncet in so often. “It ain’t, perhaps, necessary for me to say that I have been exposed to the inflooence of seventy or eighty Mrs. Scraggs for enough number of years to heave a sigh on what was comin’ to John; but I never guessed how complete his whole idea of the way this universe runs would be ruined.