I saw men melt under his words like wax; I saw wild young fellows subdued into quietude; I saw unwise old men set to thinking.
"Man, man," he'd say, lapsing in his earnestness into the broad Scotch accent of his youth, "you canna' mean plunder, and destruction, and riot! You canna! Not in this neighbourhood!" "What about Old Toombs ?" shouted one of the boys.
I never shall forget how Doctor McAlway drew himself up nor the majesty that looked from his eye.
"Old Toombs!" he said in a voice that thrilled one to the bone, "Old Toombs! Have you no faith, that you stand in the place of Almighty God and measure punishments ?" Before we left it was past midnight and we drove home, almost silent, in the darkness.
"Doctor McAlway," I said, "if Old Toombs could know the history of this night it might change his point of view." "I doot it," said the Scotch Preacher.

"I doot it." The night passed serenely; the morning saw Old Toombs's hedge standing as gorgeous as ever.

The community had again stepped aside and let Old Toombs have his way: they had let him alone, with all his great barns, his wide acres and his wonderful hedge.

He probably never even knew what had threatened him that night, nor how the forces of religion, of social order, of neighbourliness in the community which he despised had, after all, held him safe.

There is a supreme faith among common people--it is, indeed, the very taproot of democracy--that although the unfriendly one may persist long in his power and arrogance, there is a moving Force which commands events.
I suppose if I were writing a mere story I should tell how Old Toombs was miraculously softened at the age of sixty-eight years, and came into new relationships with his neighbours, or else I should relate how the mills of God, grinding slowly, had crushed the recalcitrant human atom into dust.
Either of these results conceivably might have happened--all things are possible--and being ingeniously related would somehow have answered a need in the human soul that the logic of events be constantly and conclusively demonstrated in the lives of individual men and women.
But as a matter of fact, neither of these things did happen in this quiet community of ours.