The Henchman

It was the custom of the geographers of a period not remote to grapple somewhat jejune facts to the infant mind by means of fanciful comparison: thus, Italy was likened to a boot, France to a coffee-pot, and the European domain of the Sultan to a ruffling turkey. In this pleasant scheme the state of New York was made to figure as a couchant lion, his massy head thrust high in the North Country, his forepaws dabbled in the confluence of the Hudson and the Sound, his middle and hinder parts stretched lazily westward to Lake Erie and the Niagara.

Roughly speaking, in this noble animal's rounding haunch, which Ontario cools, lies the Demijohn Congressional District whose majority party was now in convention assembled. In election returns and official utterances generally the Demijohn District bore a number like every district in the land, but the singular shape lent it by the last gerrymander had settled its popular title till another political overturn should distort its outline afresh.

The spokesman of the defeated faction had been recognized by the chair, and was moving that the convention's choice of the gentleman from Tuscarora County be declared unanimous. His manner was even more perfunctory than his words.

"The name of Calvin Ross Shelby," he ended colorlessly, "spells success."

"Screws it out as if it hurt him," whispered the Hon. Seneca Bowers to the nominee. "I tell you, Ross, there's no argument like delegates."

Bowers was a thick-set man of the later sixties, with a certain surface resemblance to General Grant of which he was vain. So far as he could he underlined the likeness, affecting a close-trimmed beard, a campaign hat, and the inevitable cigar; when the occasion promised publicity sufficient to outweigh the physical discomfort he even rode on horseback; and he was a notable figure on Decoration Day and at all public ceremonies of the Grand Army of the Republic. Shelby was his protégé.

The present member of Congress from the Demijohn District, whose seat Shelby coveted, may be most charitably described as a man of tactless integrity. His course in Washington had been a thorn in the side of the organization by whose sufferance he rose, with the upshot that the Tartar neared the end of his stewardship backed by a faction rather than a party. The faction clamored for his renomination and pushed their spirited, if poorly generalled, fight to the floor of the convention. In debate they were eloquent, in logic unanswerable; nor did any one attempt to answer them. With the best of possible causes they lacked but the best of possible worlds to insure success. The whole story of their failure was packed into the Hon. Seneca Bowers's succinct phrase, "There's no argument like delegates."

The vanquished clustered in a little group apart marked by a suggestion of tense nerves, but the gathering was noticeably of a kind. Country lawyers, bankers, merchants, stockmen, farmers, in its units, it was sealed as a whole with the seal of New England which had sent forth these men's grandfathers and great-grandfathers in their ox-carts to people and leaven the West. The transplanted New Englandism had sloughed certain traits of the pioneers who laid the axe to the forests of the Genesee Country and the Holland Purchase. Only the older people of the Demijohn District now computed their dealings in shillings; mentioning one's conscience on week-days was an eccentricity; the doctrine of Original Sin had lapsed from among burning topics of conversation; family records were less and less scrupulously kept; and the Mayflower's claim to consideration as the Noah's Ark of the only ancestors worth reckoning had assumed a mask of comedy. Yet, all said, the Yankee blood cropped out in face and limb and speech-particularly in speech; the folk of the Demijohn District did not employ the dialect of Hosea Biglow, nor a variant of it, but the insistent drawling R to be heard on every second lip was of no doubtful lineage.

The victor, who sat with folded arms as the perfunctory motion was seconded and carried, was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh. Not a few there could recall his sturdy grandfather, a pioneer of Massachusetts birth, and everybody remembered his spendthrift father who had squandered the substance of three generations in drink. The man's own story was an open page which needed no thumbing of the Tuscarora County history to find. Born under the administration of Buchanan, the lad's palm was callous with work by the surrender of Lee, and it knew no softening till his seventeenth year; yet somehow he got the marrow from the common schools, and in good time won a competitive scholarship in a narrow little sectarian college which boastfully called itself a university. Here he acquired two wholesome things: a perception that the college is but the beginning of education, and a lasting disgust with bigotry of every stripe. There followed some years of school-mastering by day and law-book drudgery by night, whose end was his admission to the bar and a partnership with the man sitting by his side. Then politics drew him, and, step by step, through rough and ready service at the polls, in town caucus, county convention, what not, he secured his footing and finally a seat in the lower house of the State Legislature. In politics a hobby is often a useful piece of property, and Shelby, who had a hobby, rode it to success; it made him a marked man in the first month of his term, it gave him a popular title, it compelled his renomination and reflection. Nowadays chairmen always introduced him as the "Champion of Canals," and even at this moment the catchword with cries of "speech" greeted him from every quarter of the dingy convention hall. He unfleshed his strong teeth in a wide-mouthed smile, rose, squared his shoulders, and walked alertly down an aisle to the platform. Brought thus into the open, under the yellow glare of a gas-light chandelier, he showed for a simply clad, businesslike person, with a well-set head and a shaven jaw, whose firmness a cushion of superfluous flesh could not disguise.

"Thank you, boys," he said.

The offhand fashion of address provoked a fresh demonstration which the nominee acknowledged with a good-humored nod. His eye sauntered over the delegates, and with a shrewd twinkle halted on the dejected group which had fought his nomination.

"This happy occasion reminds me of a Tuscarora County story," he began, with a little drawl; "the story of Tired Tinkham's election as overseer of highways at Noah's Basin-a pioneer classic which some of you have doubtless heard. It happened in the early days of Noah's Basin, when that interesting village contained perhaps a score less people than walk its changeless streets to-day. Tired Tinkham was the local Rip Van Winkle-the children's friend and labor's foe. No one could whittle green willow whistles in the springtime like Tired Tinkham, or fashion bows and arrows with such fascinating skill. Like Rip also he drank whenever a drink was forthcoming, but unlike Rip he did not hunt. Minks, coons, and squirrels were plentiful, with here and there a deer or bear, but Tired Tinkham was too weary to hunt. He fished; fished day in and day out in the canal basin, which gives the place its name; fished till the packet captains came to know him and point him out as a fixture in the scenery. But, lazy as he was, Tired Tinkham didn't monopolize all the laziness in Noah's Basin. In one particular laziness was epidemic, even among the otherwise industrious, and it took the form of shirking the road tax. No roads were wretcheder than theirs; nobody cared less than they. In his personal view of life Tired Tinkham was a fit exponent of the local theory of public duty, and some village humorist accordingly hit upon the idea of nominating him for overseer of highways. Tired Tinkham looked more than commonly fatigued at the suggestion, but did not put the crown away. His election was unanimous. Then Noah's Basin woke up. The jubilee bonfires were scarcely ashes before Tired Tinkham delivered at the corner grocery what he called his inaugural address. 'I cal'late I know why I wuz 'lected; he said. 'T' loaf 'n' let ye loaf. I cal'late ye've mistook suthin'. Ye'll work.' And work Noah's Basin did as it had never worked before."

Shelby noted that the anecdote won even a thin-lipped grin from the hostile camp.

"The Tired Tinkhams aren't so rare in politics," he went on. "We sometimes put them in the White House. Americans have a way of growing up to their responsibilities, and perhaps even I shall prove another sort of man than I've been ticketed." His tone quickened suddenly, and his glance fastened on the defeated anew. "I should count this honor less had it fallen as a ripe fruit falls, the prize of the first comer. We've had our battle; we wear our scars; no battle worth the name is without its scars; but I assume to speak for every man present when I say that the blows we give and take do not rankle to the prejudice of the common cause. Our quarrels are wholly in the family, where speech is free, for it is a fundamental article of our party creed that the will of the majority should prevail. The will of the majority made plain, it is our healthy custom to strip off our coats, and go to work: The party, not the individual, is of moment;-the historic party of our fathers, the party of the living present, the party of the future whose bounds no man may set."

As he dropped into his seat, Shelby added a foot-note.

"If that didn't jam their duty down those soreheads' throats," he told

Bowers, "I'll take another guess."

Meanwhile the nominee's fortunes and traits of character underwent dissection in his own town at the first autumn assembly of the Culture Club which, as always, met with Mrs. Hilliard. There were two profound reasons for this constancy to Mrs. Hilliard,-her house boasted the largest double parlors in New Babylon, and her husband had a billiard table. The intimate association of billiards with the pursuit of sweetness and light may at first seem grotesque, but Mrs.

Hilliard proved it to be not without warrant in sound philosophy; by her simple formula billiards stood to culture as the Salvation Army to the decorous body of the Church Militant, both alliances resting on the basic truth that some souls will prick ears only to the beating of tom-toms.

Theory aside, the fact was not to be blinked that she knew how to clash cymbals to the unregenerate and drum up in the name of culture such a varied company as no other woman could muster short of a silver wedding. In the winning of the cultivated, Mrs. Hilliard took no pride. They lent their countenance to any educational project, and she owned to herself that given a like cause any capable woman with double parlors could have them for the asking. It was rather in the hooking of men of the stamp of the Hon. Seneca Bowers and her own husband that she gloried, for in their candid souls they styled great Shakespeare rot and voted Ibsen and Tolstoi sheer bedlamites at large. While mind met mind below stairs these honest gentlemen contentedly knocked the balls about the green, smoked hospitable Joe Hilliard's cigars, and sampled the choicest liquors of his sideboard. By such diplomacy every important walk in the town's life came to have its representative in what in her heart of hearts Mrs. Hilliard called her salon.

The first autumn meeting should have gladdened the hostess. Her house had never lighted to better advantage; everybody admired the new decorations; she herself felt no impulse to quarrel either with nature or her dressmaker; the programme had run with consummate smoothness,-Volney Sprague, the editor of the Tuscarora County Whig, reading a scholarly paper on Shakespeare's anachronisms, and his fast friend Bernard Graves leading the discussion in his usual clever way; furthermore, the ices which had been ordered for this very special occasion had proved everything that ices should be. Yet Mrs. Hilliard was dissatisfied.

"The club positively loses a vital something of its individuality when

Mr. Bowers and Mr. Shelby are absent," said she.

Mrs. Bowers, a large placid personage of indefinite waist-line, remarked that nothing except politics could have dragged her husband away.

"What a pity that the Hon. Seneca had to miss your anachronisms, Volney," murmured Bernard Graves, who was a personable young gentleman of thirty.

"And Shelby," queried the editor, "hasn't that choice spirit your pity too?"

Mrs. Hilliard caught nothing of their sarcasm save Shelby's name.

"I miss his criticism," she declared. "It's so practical."

The editor fell to polishing his eye-glasses for lack of a reply.

"And so helpful," pursued the lady. "He has the faculty of ending a tangled discussion with a word."

"The dear man usually changes the subject," muttered the editor savagely under cover of an amiable platitude put forth by Mrs. Bowers.

"Or fogs it round with one of his Tuscarora yarns," dropped Graves.

The topic apparently knew no bottom for Mrs. Hilliard.

"How he will shine in Congress!" she went on. "Of course he'll get the nomination?" She referred the query to Sprague.

"Probably." His reply was lukewarm.

"And isn't there news of the convention? You ought to know, who get straight from the wires what ordinary mortals must wait to read. Has he won?"

"There was nothing definite when I left the office. They hadn't begun to ballot."

Mrs. Hilliard sensed an increasing dryness in the editor's manner.

"We're not talking literature, are we?" she laughed.

Bernard Graves considered the moment ripe for a paradox.

"The by-laws of the ideal literary club would forbid all literary talk," he declared. "Then there would be nothing else."

"Cynic," rebuked the lady, threatening punishment with her fan. "We shall talk politics if we choose."

Disseminating culture and an odor of patchouli she drifted down the drawing-room to join another group, and the two men caught a fragment of feminine comment from a divan hard by.

"Cora Hilliard is handsome," asserted a voice. "Look at those shoulders."

"She manoeuvres to show them. Besides, she's too stout."

"What can you expect, my dear, after thirty-three years of idleness?"

"She's thirty-six," came the scrupulous correction.

"You don't mean it? And a blonde!"

"Oh, I know it's so. We were classmates in the seminary. Besides, her Milicent is a year and two months older than my Georgie, who will be thirteen in October, and when Milicent was born her mother was twenty-two."

"She says she feels twenty-two now."

"Well, she looks-" the gossip languished to an indistinct murmur.

"More literary discussion," said Sprague.

"It's as literary as politics."

"You're capable of saying it's as interesting."

"Why not? It's very human."

"So is politics."

"We are drifting on the rocks of an argument. You and I can't agree about politics, and we'd better stop trying. What absorbs you bores me-this tiresome Shelby above all."

"Oh, surely you're not serious," protested Sprague, eagerly. "It isn't possible that you care nothing whether Shelby or the honest man he's scheming to supplant represents you in Washington."

"He attracts me neither as a man nor as a problem in ethics. But don't

be harsh with me. The fault is congenital, I'm sure. Every masculine

American is supposed to be interested in politics,-I wonder if the

Irish invented the notion,-but I can't conform; I don't know why."

"Gad," fumed the editor. "Your indifference is criminal."

"I like to hear you say 'gad,'" Graves observed. "You remind me of

Major Pendennis."

Sprague shrugged his thin shoulders impatiently.

"I tell you it's a crime for you to sit by as unconcerned as a mud idol while other men struggle for civic decency."

"Picturesque as usual," applauded the delinquent, unruffled; but he added, more seriously: "It's natural that you should feel strongly after your newspaper war on Shelby. Is he so sure of the nomination?"

"If he's not sure, there's no virtue in packed caucuses."

"There, that interests me," cried Graves, brightening. "I'd like to see a caucus packed. The slang attracts me somehow. Is it very shocking?"

Sprague laughed in spite of himself.

"In things political your artlessness is prehistoric," he said. "You belong in the Stone Age. All in all, you and Ross Shelby aren't far removed: he's politically immoral; you are politically unmoral."

"We'll go and talk to Ruth Temple," decided the younger man, his eye lighting on the central figure of a group, chiefly masculine. "Who can look at her and maintain that the higher education of women is a mere factory for frumps?"

"Ruth has a quaint rareness all her own," Sprague answered, watching the play of the girl's mobile face. "She had it as a mere tot. Is it her mouth, her simple dress, her hair?-One can't say precisely what."

"Don't try. You're squinting at her like an entomologist over a favorite beetle. Take her for what she seems, and chuck analysis. She is decorative. She satisfies the optic nerve."

"Which is intimately allied with other nerves, my bachelor." He counted the men around the sofa where the girl sat beside little Milicent Hilliard, and announced, "Seven; it's Queen Ruth always."

"And, like a true monarch, bored to extinction by her courtiers. Behold Dr. Crandall browbeating the Rev. Mr. Hewett like a hanging judge. I'll warrant they're talking politics too. The atmosphere is drenched with it."

Sprague bent his head to listen.

"Wrong," he chuckled slyly. "It's literature this time, or what passes as such. They're threshing out the immortal ode on the 'Victory of Samothrace.'"

Bernard Graves laughed, also, at some jest well understood, and moved to watch this eddy in the astonishingly widespread discussion of an anonymous poem, of a certain rhetorical vigor, which had been Interpreted by some critics as a plea for woman suffrage. At this juncture Mrs. Hilliard suddenly bore down upon them, flourishing a yellow paper.

"Such news, such news!" she called. "Here's a telegram-a telegram from our candidate. He is nominated! Mr. Shelby is nominated. Think of it! One of our members! And he has wired the good news to us first of all!" She searched vainly for her glasses-her big blue eyes were astigmatic-and finally, with an impatient "You read it to them all," thrust the message into Volney Sprague's reluctant fingers.

He unfolded and read the paper, in lively quandary whether her choice were as haphazard as it seemed:-

"Nominated on first ballot. Home ten-thirty. Coming directly to club.

It stands first.

"C. R. SHELBY."

"Isn't that simply dear of him?" demanded Mrs. Hilliard. "We come first. He remembers us in his hour of triumph. It shows the true nature of the man."

"It does indeed," grumbled Sprague, shifting within pinching distance of Bernard Graves, whom he had seen grinning in the background during the reading. "It's a barefaced bid for votes."

Mrs. Hilliard's enthusiasm demanded a vent.

"He'll be here in five minutes," she exclaimed, peering at the hall clock. "The message was delayed somehow, and his train is due now. We must devise a reception. We owe it to him. He thought of us. We must think of him. What shall we do? Think, think, you clever people!"

"That preposterous woman means to turn this into a ratification meeting," groaned the editor under his breath. "I must get out."

His hostess was of another mind, however, and barred retreat when he attempted to make his excuses.

"You shan't desert us," she declared roguishly. "You can't," she immediately added, at the sound of carriage wheels on the gravel of the drive. "He's here! The hall, the hall! Into the hall!" And into the hall Mrs. Hilliard masterfully bundled the Culture Club of New Babylon, grouping it theatrically around the newel-post and up the winding stair.

"Gad," muttered Sprague, struggling to efface himself, "knock me in the head."

Bernard Graves gleefully struck an attitude behind a friendly palm, and

Mrs. Hilliard threw wide the door.

"Welcome to your own people," she cried, and Shelby, closely followed by Bowers, crossed the threshold into the light. Then big Joe Hilliard, whom the unwonted commotion had attracted from the billiard room, led a boisterous cheer, which the candidate received with modestly bowed head. He flushed, and wrestled with his diffidence like a schoolboy, as the house grew still and they waited for him to speak.

"I-I don't claim the credit, friends," he stammered. "It's your victory."

Midway in the following forenoon Shelby sat in his law office revising for the seventh time the last will and testament of the Widow Weatherwax. It was the seventh revision of her third last will and testament, to speak by the card, for the widow had a bent for will-making, which the lawyer had noticed was of periodic intensity. Once, in a moment of drollery, he entered a jocose memorandum in the "tickler," under the first week-day of several successive months: "Revise Mrs. Weatherwax's will;" and such was his foresight that twice only during that term did she frustrate his prophecy.

This day, as always, she attained the topmost step outside his office door breathless, and, as always, Shelby gravely lent a hand to deposit her plump little person in the softest of his old-fashioned office chairs. The ceremony ended regularly with the panting announcement, "The Lord has spared me for another month."

It was the man's custom at such times to allot equal praise to Providence and the widow's marvellous vitality for this happy issue, and to hazard a guess that she had thought of important changes for her will. The widow would nod assent over a heaving bosom, and slowly fan herself back to normal respiration. The relict of a leather-lunged Free Methodist preacher, she affected a garb of ostentatious simplicity. No godless pleats or tucks or gores or ruffles or sinful abominations of braid defaced the chaste sobriety of her black gown; buttons were tolerated merely as buttons, without vain thought of ornament; and the strange little bonnet, which she perched above hair whose natural coquetry of curl was austerely sleeked away, was of a composition so harshly ugly that more worldly-minded women shuddered at the sight. The worldly-minded, indeed, were prone to the criticism that the material of Mrs. Weatherwax's garments was beyond cavil, but this surely was her own concern. It were sheer impertinence to finger the texture of a zealot's sackcloth.

Shelby busied himself with his papers, pending her recovery.

"Them stairs alluz give me sech a turn," she sighed, at length. She enunciated her R's with the merciless fidelity of her section at its worst, saying stair-urs and tur-urn.

"Too bad the town's boom stopped short of elevators," sympathized

Shelby.

"Shouldn't use 'em, anyway," returned the widow, firmly. "They give me a wuss turn than the stairs."

"They're trying moving stairways in some places,-a French invention, I believe."

"Shouldn't use them contrapshuns neither. The French are a godless people, full of vanity and all uncleanness."

Shelby's imagination balked at suggesting another alternative, and he held his peace. The visitor's jetty eyes forsook his face and pounced upon the clerk, who, with tongue in cheek, was filling out narrow slips of paper at a battered table clothed in a baize of a dye traditionally held to have been green.

"How's your ma's lumbago, Willie Irons?" she demanded.

The youth stammered a husky reply, and blushed far into his brick-colored hair. He was of an age when a babyish diminutive becomes a thorn unspeakable. Mrs. Weatherwax glanced tranquilly past his writhings to the ancient table.

"Ross," she asked, "wa'n't that your grandfather's?"

"Yes. He used it in his place of business."

"I call to mind seein' it in the old distillery when I was a girl," pursued the widow, who never called a spade an agricultural implement. "Distillin's a wicked business."

"People thought differently about many things in my grandfather's day."

The widow sniffed. "Wrong's wrong. Is that Seneca Bowers's roll-top desk?"

"It was Mr. Bowers's. I bought it when we dissolved partnership."

"Law books, too?"

"Yes."

"Threw in the pictur's, I s'pose?" indicating some dingy lithographs of political worthies past and present.

"Yes," admitted Shelby with superhuman good nature; "they came to boot."

The widow sniffed again. "'Pears to me," said she, "you've got nothin' new."

The man wheeled in his chair to a neighboring safe and took a tape-bound document from a pigeon-hole.

"Shall we begin?" he asked.

"Yes-if you're so rushed," she returned, and composed her features to fitting solemnity. As the lawyer slowly read the instrument, which he could have rattled off from memory, Mrs. Weatherwax punctuated the pious phrases of its exordium with approving wags. "'Frail and transitory,'" she interpolated; "that's jest what life is. I might be took any minute." At the reference to the payment of her lawful debts she recovered her spirits sufficiently to put in that she did not owe a "red cent," as everybody knew. Finally she called a halt. "Needn't go any farther," she directed. "The first part's what I like to hear best. Exceptin' one thing, all the rest about my green rep sofy a-goin' to Cousin Phoebe, the pickle-caster to Brother Henry, the old dishes what can't be sold to my beloved nephew, Jason Weatherwax, and my best tablecloths and sheets and pillow-slips to his little Ann Eliza when she gets a husband what's a good provider, is fixed jest as it hed ought to be. What I want now is a postscript."

"Another codicil? Very well."

He made note of her wishes concerning a cherished feather bed which it had struck her was too good for that "shiftless coot," Cousin Phoebe's husband, to lie upon, and, bidding her bring her witnesses on the morrow, bustled the will into his safe and fell upon his papers after the manner of all lawyer kind since Chaucer's sergeant of the law who "semed besier than he was."

The widow eyed his movements placidly.

"In a stew to hev me go?" she asked.

"Of course not," Shelby protested. "What put that in your head?"

"Your squirmin' round. Seein' I'm entirely welcome, I'll set a piece."

Shelby restrained the delight he said he felt and returned to his papers under her relentless scrutiny.

"Telegraphs of congratulashun, I s'pose," the visitor presently observed.

"Yes; my friends are rejoicing with me."

"Everybody tickled?"

"All but the common enemy, I trust."

"I ain't hed a chance to go about much and ask," said the widow, with a preliminary sniff; "but I've met some as wa'n't tickled or enemies neither."

"No? Well, after all, this isn't paradise, but New York politics."

"At Tompkins's-I alluz go to him for my Oolong-I heard that Doc Crandall won't vote for you after your dead set at the place. He's one of your party, isn't he?"

"Yes. The doctor is one of us. Good fellow, too."

"And at Brady's, where I get my corn meal, I heard somebody say you've got the Irish down on you."

"Oh, I hope not," returned the candidate, cheerfully. "They're a most respectable and industrious factor in our town's life. I like the Irish."

"I s'pose."

He searched her face and concluded that her irony was unconscious; she undeceived him.

"Butter wouldn't melt in your mouth now you're runnin' for office," she said, laboring to her feet. "I'm s'prised you hevn't wings."

Shelby affected to relish the hoary jest, and escorted her gayly to the door. "I'll look for you to-morrow," he assured her.

"Don't strain your eyes," said the widow.

The Hon. Seneca Bowers passed her on the stairs. Greeting the lawyer, he seated himself behind the clerk's back, with a meaning slant of his Grant-like head.

Shelby understood. "Leave those notices of trial for the present, William," he ordered, "and get this stipulation signed. If the man isn't in his office, try the county clerk's."

Bowers pulled with clock-work precision at his cigar, while the boy uncoiled his long legs from his chair, and with furtive little pats at his necktie and fiery shock, made ready to go out. Shelby stumbled upon the waste-paper basket as the door slammed at his clerk's heels, and with vicious satisfaction he kicked it to the room's far end.

The caller's eyes twinkled.

"The Widow Weatherwax been administering spiritual balm?" he asked.

"I could wring her neck," Shelby averred.

"Her will again?"

"Of course."

"You'll have it as long as you practise law. I did. It goes with the office. Remunerative as ever?"

"Talk about 'benefit of clergy,'" exploded the younger man; "that mediaeval bonanza isn't to be mentioned in the same week with the ministerial half-rates, donations, and hold-ups we moderns put up with. This pulpit pounder's shrew pays me no more than she pays the doctor, the grocer, the butcher, and the rest. What a ukase I could issue if I were Czar of these United States."

"Cousin Phoebe's 'sofy,' beloved Nephew Jason's unsalable dishes, and

Brother Henry's pickle-caster still extant?"

"Yes, yes," groaned Shelby.

"And little Ann Eliza's sheets and pillow-slips, I dare say. It's astonishing how they endure."

"It's astonishing how I endure."

"You must-at any rate, till the Tuesday after the first Monday in

November. Did the pious gossip tell you any pleasant personal news?"

"She has heard talk that the Micks are sore and that Doc Crandall has had an attack of virtue."

"You needn't lose sleep over the handful of Irish in our camp; they know who butters their parsnips. And I'll take care of the doctor. He's an innocuous mugwump. She didn't mention Volney Sprague?"

"Sprague," said Shelby, wearily; "what is that man up to now?"

Bowers rose, paced the room, and returned, big with news.

"The Whig has bolted," he announced.