of Sherburn's palings as thick as they could jam together, and you couldn't hear yourself think for the noise.  It was a little twenty-foot yard.  Some sung out “Tear down the fence! tear down the fence!”  Then there was a racket of ripping and tearing and smashing, and down she goes, and the front wall of the crowd begins to roll in like a wave. Just then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his little front porch, with a double-barrel gun in his hand, and takes his stand, perfectly ca'm and deliberate, not saying a word.  The racket stopped, and the wave sucked back. Sherburn never said a word--just stood there, looking down.  The stillness was awful creepy and uncomfortable.  Sherburn run his eye slow along the crowd; and wherever it struck the people tried a little to out-gaze him, but they couldn't; they dropped their eyes and looked sneaky. Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant kind, but the kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread that's got sand in it. Then he says, slow and scornful: “The idea of _you_ lynching anybody!  It's amusing.  The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a _man_!  Because you're brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a _man_?  Why, a _man's_ safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind--as long as it's daytime and you're not behind him. “Do I know you?  I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man's a coward.  In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot.  Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people--whereas you're just _as_ brave, and no braver.  Wh