Then there was a silent but general conviction on the part of the inhabitants of the town in which Timothy was born, that there were Tottens enough. Although they might not have held a town-meeting to take any steps to prevent the coming of Timothy, if they had had a foreknowledge of it, there is none the less doubt that they regarded his coming as something of a public calamity. They could not expect that Timothy, with his slender chances for education and moral training, would be any improvement on the other nine Tottens, and these had long been looked upon as a grievous infliction. All of the boys had been in the Reform School (the only schooling they ever had) and they were generally accredited with all the hen-roost robbing, watermelon thieving, and miscellaneous trouble-making which took place in the village. The overseer of the poor regarded them as a future inheritance, and even the Census Taker (although a stranger), when he visited the house, looked as though he thought there were too many of them. But perhaps his prejudice may have been owing to the fact that when he got up to wipe his pen Bill Totten moved his chair back a little, and when he sat down again it was not there. In this swelling tide of remonstrance against the coming of Timothy, it cannot in justice be omitted that even the dogs and cats of his native village, as well as an ancient donkey who grazed upon the Common, would have loudly joined could they have had any intelligent sense of it. Nor would the very frogs in the adjacent marshes, already sorely stoned by Timothy’s brothers, have failed to add their dismal, croaking protest to the universal cry. To all these helpless creatures the coming of Timothy simply meant the advent of another tormentor. It was of course utterly impossible that they should want him. Finally to add to this cloud of objectors to Timothy’s coming, a dry and hard-headed and terrible old man by the name of Malthus, had written a book on Population, in which he had proved by many stony facts and immutable figures, that Timothy was not wanted; that, in fact, the world would be greatly better off without him, and that he ought, by every reasonable means, to be discouraged from coming. All scientific people had great respect for this book, so that if all the conditions had been understood, and a vote had been taken throughout the whole world as to whether Timothy should come or not, there is no doubt that there would have been an overwhelming, universal negative.