A wonder working power in the precious...

...credible as they seem are not the results of mass hysteria...

You may wish to adjust the dial.

You're currently tuned to the wrong station. I'm Fergus Ontario was a small town.

But that didn't matter. It could have been ten times. Fergus Ontario was a small town.

But that didn't matter.

It could have been ten times the size, and Bruce McCowan-Claigan still would have been its richest man by far.

You see, he owned the Pulp and Timber Mill.

He liked to brag that each year a Spanish armada's worth of trees would sail through

his mill. And each decade on average, two children would die of mercury poisoning in the village

downstream, their pink hands swollen and peeling as they sweated in the cold of their

clapboard houses, and their mothers bravely tried to pretend it was going to be okay.

Everybody knew this was because of the mill.

But the courts wouldn't let you lay a finger on Bruce McCown-Claugan because they said you

couldn't prove it.

And anyway, it was an Ojibwe village downstream.

And the judges, if you cornered them in conversation by the beer engine at the local pub,

or in the back corner of the Orangeman's Hall during bingo night,

well, they'd tell you in their judgely way that if it was Mercury that killed those kids,

and they weren't saying that it was, because there was no proof despite all the symptoms.

But if it was Mercury, then there was no proof despite all the symptoms. But if it was mercury,

then there was no evidence it came from the mill. And even if it did, then, well, in the end,

...