Throne Room, consulting, directing day after day, and when
the Legislature assembled, "the boys" began to call at Mr. Balch's
office. But Mr. Balch never again broached the subject of money to
Jethro Bass.

We have to sing the song of sixpence for the last time in these pages;
and as it is an old song now, there will be no encores. If you can buy
one member of the lower house for ten dollars, how many members can you
buy for fifty? It was no such problem in primary arithmetic that Mr.
Balch and his associates had to solve--theirs was in higher mathematics,
in permutations and combinations, and in least squares. No wonder the
old campaigners speak with tears in their eyes of the days of that ever
memorable summer. There were spoils to be picked up in the very streets
richer than the sack of the thirty cities; and as the session wore on
it is affirmed by men still living that money rained down in the Capitol
Park and elsewhere like manna from the skies, if you were one of a
chosen band. If you were, all you had to do was to look in your vest
pockets when you took your clothes off in the evening and extract enough
legal tender to pay your bill at the Pelican for a week. Mr. Lovejoy
having been overheard one day to make a remark concerning the diet of
hogs, the next morning certain visitors to the capital were horrified
to discover trails of corn leading from the Pelican House to their
doorways. Men who had never seen a receiving teller opened bank
accounts. No, it was not a problem in simple arithmetic, and Mr. Balch
and Mr. Flint, and even Mr. Duncan and Mr. Worthington, covered whole
sheets with figures during the stifling days in July. Some men are so
valuable that they can be bought twice, or even three times, and they
make figuring complicated.

Jethro Bass did no calculating. He sat behind the curtains, and he must
have kept the figures in his head.

The battle had closed in earnest, and for twelve long, sultry weeks it
raged with unabated fierceness. Consolidation had a terror for the
rural mind, and the state Tribune skilfully played its stream upon the
constituents of those gentlemen who stood tamely at the Worthington
hitching-posts, and the constituents flocked to the capital; that able
newspaper, too, found space to return, with interest, the attacks of Mr.
Worthington's organ, the Newcastle Guardian. These amenities are much
too personal to reproduce here, now that the smoke of battle has rolled
away. An ep