THY NEIGHBOR'S GOODS
239
There it goes now, at Lane's Crossing. Mezzo.soprano-two
longs, a short, and a very long. The sound is so persistently obvious
you can almost see it, like a rag of vapor hanging heavily over the
trees. The blow of a train seems always trying to tell you some–
thing important, like an omen; to tell you "0 make haste" perhaps.
Men who feel that acquisition of a million dollars is merely
a steppmg stone to two, and so on pyramidally, would be snugly
content
if
knocked down to ten.thousand-a-year-if they knew
ten-thousand-a.year was the legal limit circumscribing all the
]oneses alike. The juggernaut of immense personal wealth is sus–
tained mostly by psychological hysteria. Nobody actually
earns
a
million dollars. As much economic error as money goes through
the paying teller's window, though the mathematical calculations
be never off a fraction of a cent.
There is war in America without military trappings.
False advertisers make air raids, without warning, on open
towns. Speculators throw artillery fire into farming regions.
Businesses purge their ranks and blockade minorities. And there
are always the professional and technical snipers ready to pick off
anyone who ventures from cover.
A rifle shot pings on the metal roof directly overhead. An
acorn has dropped twenty feet from a Red oak that must have been
a stout sapling when Phinizy's Mill turned out its first bolt of
osnaburgs.
There is a sliver of cheddar in this house, and a drop of port,
and sleep. Food, stimulus, rest. Marvelous things toward main–
tenance of principles. And givers of physical strength. You may
have to knock hell out of somebody on the morrow; you never
know.
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