selves recalling something particularly
keen, something analytical and searching as a probe, which he had
voiced on this occasion or that.

"I remember how Manners used to say," they would begin; and then quote
as accurately as it were possible. But directly, when they discovered
how happily these epigrams were received by those who had not heard
them, they acquired a singular habit; they began to leave out Manners'
name and appropriate the applause to themselves. Thus they robbed the
dead man safely, nor found the practice ghoulish. One or two thereby
even acquired permanent fame as an after-dinner wit.

Even his enemies, implacable, political enemies, who had done the most
to destroy him, more than the temperament which he himself believed to
be a blight, were a little more honest than that. They had fought him
according to their own rules, which debarred nothing, with every foul
trick they knew. If there was a weak spot in a man's record, go after
it; if he had been a weakling, temporarily a fool, seek it out. There
were human bloodhounds always sniffing to come upon such a scent. Hunt
it down; find the woman.

As a matter of fact, there had not been a woman, after all. That had
been a mistake. A bad mistake, for it had killed his wife. But a
lucky mistake for them! For it had delivered into their hands the
secret of an actual and even more vulnerable place to attack.

Before his wife's death he had been proud enough to hide it, and fight
it out when the struggle was on, within the four walls of his home.
But afterward he seemed to cease to care.

Shameless! That was the pass to which they said he had come, in the
very worthy, very tight-traditioned and not very large town in which
the white house stood. And the day he rose drunk in Assembly, white,
haggard drunk, they read his doom aloud. Dead politically the papers
said. Fools! Dead in hopes they should have written; dead in his
debonair heart; dead sick of fighting a losing fight. And dying.

This last, the sudden death of his body, however, took them by
surprise. They had not been observant. Yet on that bright day when
quite as many of his political enemies as friends rode behind him, the
latter were rather quick and proud to notice this. In suitably hushed
voices they remarked that it proved their broad-mindedness as a
community.

But whenever anything particularly crooked was being crammed through
thereafter at the State Capitol, his