r in an important
agricultural county. Some, in the shameless laudation of a sensational
press, compared me to the younger Pitt. As a matter of fact, I had some
talent for organization, and in any gathering of men, I somehow never
lacked a following. I was young enough to be an honest partisan,
enthusiastic enough to be useful, strong enough to be respected,
ignorant enough to believe my party my country's safeguard, and I was
prominent in my county before I was old enough to vote. At twenty-one I
conducted a convention fight which made a member of Congress. It was
quite natural, therefore, that I should be delegate to this convention,
and that I had looked forward to it with keen expectancy. The remarkable
thing was my falling off from its work now by virtue of that recent
marvelous experience which as I have admitted was one of the heart. Do
not smile. At three-and-twenty even delegates have hearts.

My mental and sentimental state is of importance in this history, I
think, or I should not make so much of it. I feel sure that I should not
have behaved just as I did had I not been at that moment in the
iridescent cloudland of newly-reciprocated love. Alice had accepted me
not an hour before my departure for Chicago. Hence my loathing for such
things as nominating speeches and the report of the Committee on
Credentials, and my yearning for the Vau Vau grotto. She had yielded
herself up to me with such manifold sweetnesses, uttered and unutterable
(all of which had to be gone over in my mind constantly to make sure of
their reality), that the contest in Indiana, and the cause of our own
State's Favorite Son, became sickening burdens to me, which rolled away
as I gazed upon the canvases in the gallery. I lay back upon a seat,
half closed my eyes, and looked at the pictures. When one comes to
consider the matter, an art gallery is a wonderfully different thing
from a national convention!

As I looked on them, the still paintings became instinct with life.
Yonder shepherdess shielding from the thorns the little white lamb was
Alice, and back behind the clump of elms was myself, responding to her
silvery call. The cottage on the mountain-side was ours. That lady
waving her handkerchief from the promontory was Alice, too; and I was
the dim figure on the deck of the passing ship. I was the knight and
she the wood-nymph; I the gladiator in the circus, she the Roman lady
who agonized for me in the audience; I the troubadour who