aits where the fine, fragile linen had ripped lengthwise,
and the collars were frayed down and broken across and caved in limply.
Finally he gave them up too, and one morning came to work wearing a
flimsy, sleazy, negligee shirt. I reckon you know the kind of shirt I
mean--always it fits badly, and the sleeves are always short and the
bosom is skimpy, and the color design is like bad wall-paper. After his
old full-bosomed grandeur this shirt, with a ten-cent collar buttoned on
to it and overriding the neckband, and gaping away in the front so that
the major's throat showed, seemed to typify more than anything else the
days upon which he had fallen. About this time I thought his voice took
on a changed tone permanently. It was still hollow, but it no longer
rang.

A good many men similarly placed would have taken to drink, but Major
Putnam Stone plainly was never born to be a drunkard and hard times
couldn't make one of him. With a sort of gentle, stupid persistence he
hung fast to his poor job, blundering through some way, struggling
constantly to learn the first easy tricks of the trade--the a, b, c's of
it--and never succeeding. He still lugged the classical poets and the
war into every story he tried to write, and day after day Devore
maintained his policy of eloquent brutal silence, refusing dumbly to
accept the major's clumsy placating attempts to get upon a better
footing with him. After that once he had never attempted to scold the
old man, but he would watch the major pottering round the city room,
and he would chew on his under lip and viciously lance his scalp with
his pencil point.

Well, aside from the major, Devore had his troubles that summer. That
was the summer of the biggest, bitterest campaign that the state had
seen, so old-timers said, since Breckinridge ran against Douglas and
both of them against Lincoln. If you have ever lived in the South,
probably you know something of political fights that will divide a state
into two armed camps, getting hotter and hotter until old slumbering
animosities come crawling out into the open, like poison snakes from
under a rock, and new lively ones hatch from the shell every hour or so
in a multiplying adder brood.

This was like that, only worse. Stripped of a lot of embroidery in the
shape of side issues and local complications, it resolved itself in a
last-ditch, last-stand, back-to-the-wall fight of the old regime of the
party against the new. On one side we