came of fine clean blends of blood. His father
had been a descendant of Norman-English folk who settled in Maryland
before the Revolution; the family name had originally been Maillard,
afterward corrupted into Mallard. His mother's people were
Scotch-Irish immigrants of the types that carved out their homesteads
with axes on the spiny haunches of the Cumberlands. In the Civil War
his father had fought for the Union, in a regiment of borderers; two
of his uncles had been partisan rangers on the side of the
Confederacy. If he was a trifle young to be of that generation of
public men who were born in unchinked log cabins of the wilderness or
prairie-sod shanties, at least he was to enjoy the subsequent
political advantage of having come into the world in a two-room house
of unpainted pine slabs on the sloped withers of a mountain in East
Tennessee. As a child he had been taken by his parents to one of the
states which are called pivotal states. There he had grown up--farm
boy first, teacher of a district school, self-taught lawyer, county
attorney, state legislator, governor, congressman for five terms, a
floor leader of his party--so that by ancestry and environment, by the
ethics of political expediency and political geography, by his own
record and by the traditions of the time, he was formed to make an
acceptable presidential aspirant.

In person he was most admirably adapted for the role of statesman. He
had a figure fit to set off a toga, a brow that might have worn a crown
with dignity. As an orator he had no equal in Congress or, for that
matter, out of it. He was a burning mountain of eloquence, a veritable
human Vesuvius from whom, at will, flowed rhetoric or invective, satire
or sentiment, as lava might flow from a living volcano. His mind
spawned sonorous phrases as a roe shad spawns eggs. He was in all
outward regards a shape of a man to catch the eye, with a voice to
cajole the senses as with music of bugles, and an oratory to inspire.
Moreover, the destiny which shaped his ends had mercifully denied him
that which is a boon to common men but a curse to public men. Jason
Mallard was without a sense of humour. He never laughed at others; he
never laughed at himself. Certain of our public leaders have before now
fallen into the woful error of doing one or both of these things.
Wherefore they were forever after called humourists--and ruined. When
they said anything serious their friends took it humorously, and w