5. SHE REACHED frantically toward the faces around her.

Gimme a knife, Gimme a knife! O lordy! O Lordy! Gimme a knife!

Two open knives clattered on the brick pavement in the little
ring around the trees.

Gracie caught up one and began slashing the rope. It was tough.
She haggled and haggled with the duil knife. At last a strand held it.
another stroke cut it apart. Toussaint collapsed. His mother, trying
to hold him up, fell with him.

A dozen drunken voices in the mob broke into laughter at the
downfall of the negro mother and her dead son."

In detail in the Forge and the Store Stribling is more subtle than
in the passages quoted from Teeftallow. But his point of view is
unchanged. Not fair. The only three admirable characters in Store are
Grace, Toussaint, andänders. CF. Ditmas.

4. "What do you Northern folks discuss, what do you think about", the only villager whom Stribling inquires the village atheist, whom Stribling endows with any intellectual appetite. And Ditmas puffs thoughtfully: "Well, when you leave out business, we are occupied with sports, fiction, drama, science, philosophy, and such things". And Stribling remarks, fearful that his point may not sink home: "It was noteworthy that every single item in Mr. Ditmas's list was reckoned sinful by the hill folk".

It is too obvious what Stribling is up to. He posits a paradise where...

3. NOT A PERSON was on the streets. The village was at supper. The village devoted this single moment of the day when all the filth of its streets and all the moral cruelties and pettinesses of its life were forgiven in the solemn absolution of sunset; it devoted that single moment to eating. What cared the village for this pageantry of the west? Of what moment to them was this tender forgiving hour; they who had nothing to be forgiven? Let them eat hot bread in mean rooms beneath lithographs of dead fish, let them talk of the last scandal, or simply eat in silence. That miracle of jade and turquoise fades slowly into the seapblue depth of night, but what have they to do with that?

Now the implication of this passage is that in large cities people postpone the dinner hour in order to receive the solemn absolution of sunset. That, I believe in my slight acquaintance with large cities, N.Y. for instance, is a poor proposition for a realist to maintain. As a criticism of humanity....

2. THE Dining room of the Scovell House was dark and smelly as if air and sunlight were luxuries hardly to be arrived at in the country. The table linen was dirty and torn; the silver plating was worn off the spoons; the coffee cost thirty cents a pound. Yet Abner could never enter the dining room of the Scovell House without a certain embarrassment at the magnificence of its service". Here Stribling has leagued himself and the reader together in a common acquaintance with the decorous and sanitary luxury of expensive hotels. His business as a novelist is with Abner, but he cannot despatch that business without a characteristic irrelevance.

SNOB.

1. SOME of the nearer stragglers whistled discreetly at the two youths, and Zed answered them. Three men came up; one had a bottle. He passed it round with "Have a jolt". "Take a kick". "Bail her out". As each man drank he wiped the mouth of the bottle carefully on his shirt sleeve and returned it to the owner. There was a certain ritualism about it which impressed Abner as being urbane and cultured. These Irontown men certainly had a polish one didn't find in the hills".

Stribling is not content to describe the drinking manners of the workmen and the effect on the boy; he must describe them in terms, culture and urbanity, which are foreign to the boy's way of thinking and which cast the scene against a drawing room background. Such irony is too simple; and it may be vulgar.