.. a shack built
practically in its entirety of old dry goods boxes ... a two-room affair
with a sort of enlarged dog-kennel adjunct that stood out nearer the
road--Jones's workshop.
The man looked like the philosopher he was--the anarchist-philosopher,
as the newspapers were to dub him ... as he sat there before his last,
hammering away at the shoe he was heeling, not stopping the motions of
his hands, while he put that pair aside, to sew at another pair, while
he discoursed at large with me over men and affairs.
"What is all this trouble I'm hearing about?" I asked him.
"Trouble?--same old thing: Alfred Grahame, when he founded, started,
this colony, was a true idealist. But success has turned his head,
worsened him, since,--as it has done with many a good man before. Now he
goes about the country lecturing, on Shakespeare, God, the Devil, or
anything else that he knows nothing about....
"But it isn't that that I object to ... it is that he's allowing the
original object of this colony, and of the Single Tax Idea, to become
gradually perverted here. We're becoming nothing but a summer resort for
the aesthetic quasi-respectables ... these folk are squeezing us poor,
honest radicals out, by making the leases prohibitive in price and
condition."
He stopped speaking, while he picked up another pair of shoes, examined
them, chose one, and began sewing a patch on it.
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