Ten Thousand a Year 253 



carry its feed-wire underground, and construct a 

 siding with freight-station and convenient ap- 

 proaches; but the council was found to belong to 

 the company, for all purposes. "They never 

 quarrel,'* was his solace as he again sauntered 

 among his trees and vines, "And they never cheat. " 

 "Ajax, " "Socrates," "Alexander," even the four- 

 teen "Pharaohs," a prune tree for each dynasty, 

 would not have voted the franchise. "But if 

 Socrates should do such a thing!" — ^he paused at 

 the brink of the awful thought — " I'd rip him out 

 if he had a million bushels of cherries on his back." 

 He was always talking in millions. " What is the 

 outlook for grapes this season?" Byron, one of the 

 buyers from New York, asked him the day he 

 received Neville's first shipment of strawberries. 

 "Oh, not a million tons, I guess," and there the 

 estimate stopped. It was "not a million quarts" 

 of raspberries; "little less than a million baskets of 

 peaches. " Neville always gave himself an ample 

 margin in his estimates. "And Socrates and I are 

 not responsible," was his word of relief over the 

 trolley deal. The real Neville was his conscience 

 and his Calvinistic conviction that "whatsoever a 

 man sows that also shall he reap." This, you 

 would say, had you known Neville, came to him 

 by accident of birth, for his forebears were all 

 Scotch Presbyterians who had settled in the Valley 

 while Washington was President. Yet Neville 

 did not pose as a religious man; indeed, some of his 

 speeches, as is not uncommon among some denomi- 



