this election!"

"Oh!" said Edgington, "_have_ you! And how about your publishing an
itemized account of campaign expenses?"

Alvord, his last card played, fell back beaten, every vestige of
optimistic pugnacity gone from his face. Edgington laid his hand on
the other's shoulder, in sympathy.

"I tell you, Jim," said he, as he departed, "this is no place nor time
to run a reform campaign. Brassfield isn't the candidate for it, and
you're not the manager. You're simply fish trying to fly. Come with
me and we'll get into our natural element."

"Not by a good deal," said Alvord stubbornly. "I don't know anything
in this but Brassfield, and to him I'll stick!"

"As you please," said Edgington. "But keep the lid on the Scarlett
business!"

Alvord made no reply. But when Edgington was gone he took up his work
with a groan of real distress.

XXIII

THE MOVING FINGER WRITES

To the Queen came the guard full of zeal:
Haled in bonds the Pretender:
"Shall it be noose or knout, rack or wheel?"
But her proud face grew tender.
Down she stepped from her throne--made him free;
"Love," she said, with a sigh,
"What is rank? You are you, we are we, I am I!"
--_The Cheating of Zenobia_.

I should like to write, just here, a little disquisition on Crises. I
should show how all nature moves ever on and on toward certain
cataclysmic events, each of which marks a point of departure for new
ascents in progression. I should begin, of course, with the Nebular
Hypothesis, its crash of suns, followed by the evolution of the star
and its system of planets, its life, cooling, death, and a fresh crisis
forming a new nebula. I should end with either Revolutions or Malaria,
depending on whether I should last consider the subject in its relation
to sociology or to pathology; but in any case, somewhere along in the
latter third of the work, I should treat of Love and Marriage, and
therein of the Crisis and Catastrophe in Romance.

I have a good mind to do it!

But, no; crises in general must wait, seeing that our particular one
stands clamoring for solution. The concrete bids away with the
abstraction. None of our friends of this history could be brought just
now, for a single moment, to seek solace in philosophy, unless it might
be Professor Blatherwick--and he is entirely oblivious of the fact of
the crisis having made its appearance.

Not so, for instance, with the professor's ex