o see you, and have you promise that
anything I promised should be good, see?"

"Uncle Ike, I heard a rumor about you yesterday that tickled me most to
death."

"Well, you are a dum nice lot of politicians, to work up this boom for
me, without my consent," and the old man put up his razor, and began
to wash the lather off his face, and while he was rubbing his red and
laughing face with a towel, he said: "If I am elected President, and
I want you to understand that I have not yet consented to take the
nomination, I would, the first thing I did, have all my relatives either
sent to jail, or confined in various asylums of one kind or another. I
think I would send you to a home for the feeble-minded."

"What's the matter with relatives?" said the boy, as he took the razor,
and searched around on his lip for some hairs, and finally got hold of
one, and the razor pulled it so hard the tears came in his eyes; "seems
to me a President with all his relatives in jail would be looked upon as
a disgrace to society."

"Well, I wouldn't care," said the old man, as he struggled to make
a fourteen-inch collar button on to a sixteen-inch shirt, and nearly
choked himself before he found out he had got the boy's collar by
mistake. "I have watched this President business a good many years, and
have concluded that the most of the trouble a President has is through
fool relatives. Look at Grant. You couldn't throw a stone in Washington
without hitting a relative, and they got into more scrapes, and dragged
Grant into more disgrace, and fool schemes, than anything. There wasn't
offices enough for all of them, and some had to live in other ways,
which didn't help Ulysses very much. Harrison never had any pleasure
until he had an operation performed on his son to remove his talking
utensils. That boy would be interviewed and jollied, and he would tell
more things that were not so, about pa's policy, than the President
could stand. But a brother is the worst relative a President can have,
if he is a half-way lawyer. A President cannot kill a brother that is
older than he is, and can't prevent his being retained, and can't keep
his brother's fingers out of all the contracts, and his being attorney
for contractors, and can't tell him to keep away from the White House,
and don't dare to tell his brother not to go around looking wise, as
though he was running the whole administration. No, sir; there ought to
be a law that when a man is elected