Unfortunately the colonel, after putting out the light again, bumped into a table, and Mr. Jonstone waked.
"Yes, Bob; sorry I waked you. Did Miss Darling send word explaining that I should be quite a while coming back?"
"I took a turn for the better shortly after you left. A little while ago I lighted a candle, and read a little and got sleepy. And now I think I'll go to sleep again."
"Isn't Eve about the oldest name you know?"
"Oldest, I guess, except Adam and Lilith. You go to sleep."
And Colonel Meredith tiptoed out of the room, murmuring: "Seems to be a little shaky in his upper stories."
A point of land just across the lake from the camp belonged to the Darlings' mother, the Princess Oducalchi. One night the light of fires and lanterns appeared on this point and the next morning it was seen to be studded here and there with pale-brown tents. The Darlings were annoyed to think that any one should trespass on so large a scale on some one else's land. In a code of laws shot to pieces with class legislation, trespassers are, of course, exempt from punishment; their presence and depredations in one's private melon-patch are none the less disagreeable, and Arthur Darling, as his mother's representative, was peculiarly enraged.
Arthur, in his idle moments, when, for instance, he was not studying the webs of spiders or classifying the cries of frogs, sometimes let his mind run on politics and the whole state of the Union. In such matters, of course, he was only a tyro. Why should the puny and prejudiced population of Texas have two votes in the Senate when the hordes of New York have but two? Why, in a popular form of government, should the minority do the ruling? Why should not a hard-working rich man have an equal place in the sun with a man who, through laziness and a moral nature twisted like a pretzel, remains poor? Why should education be forced on children in a country where education, which means good manners and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, amounts practically to disfranchisement?
Arthur, in his political ruminations, could never get beyond such questions as these. If A has paid for and owns a piece of land, why is it not A's to enjoy, rather than B's, whose sole claim thereto is greater strength of body than A, and the desire to possess those things which are not his?