Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/126

 away and reloaded, and fired away again, and collected their bag of game entirely regardless of the target, which, nevertheless, most of them had set up for themselves at the beginning of the match. He was quite ready to acknowledge that he missed his aim as often as not, but it was not for the sake of side issues. And as to this matter of the cotton, he did not care to go into the pros and cons of it. There was but one thing to be considered, and that was an innate repugnance to making money out of other people's misfortunes. He not only would not do it if it was wrong; he would have hated to do it if it had been ever so right.

On the question of the right of secession William Pratt had thought long and deeply, though perhaps a little confusedly. He lived in a very loyal community. The Union was something which most of his neighbors could not reason about. It was something sacred and unassailable as the moral law. If he tried to argue with them they looked at him askance, quite as though he had undertaken to defend kidnapping or burglary. It is possible that the opinion which he had arrived at was partly the result of a natural antagonism. William Pratt was so constituted that if he had been told every day of his life that a quadruped had necessarily four legs, it is more than likely that he would have come firmly to believe in the existence of a five-legged beast of that description.