around some awed. I sent
the foreman of the pressroom out for a bottle of fizz. Sarsaparilla
was the nearest he could come to it, but it went. Then I turned my hot
young blood loose on the editorial page. 'This,' said I, 'is my
opportunity to save the country, and I'm goin' to save it, right here.'
It was then eleven hours, forty-five minutes, and eight seconds by the
grandpa clock which adorned the newly furnished sanctum." Dan Anderson
again sat silent a few moments, the stub of his _cigarrillo_ between
his fingers.

"Oh, well," said he, "it might, perhaps, have been worse, although I
admit that was unlikely. I couldn't prove an alibi, but there were
extenuatin' circumstances. The fact was, I got the politics of the
place mixed up almost as bad as the People's Choice. That community
woke up as one man at six-thirty the next morning, and turned out to
see the evidence of their progress. I never did see so many Democrats
in my life. Or was it Republicans? I forget. I had given 'em a good,
hot, mixed Princeton paper,--dog, international law, society,
industrial progress, footlight favorites, and the whole business; had
Sermons from Many Lands, and a Conundrum Department, as well as a
Household Corner--How to get Beautiful for the ladies, How to get Rich
for the men, How to get Strong for the advertisers--why, if I do say
it, I don't believe any one fellow was ever much more cosmopolitan in
all his life, inside the space of one night's writin'. But they didn't
like me. I was too good for them. Ah, well!"

Dan Anderson sighed softly. The lazy sun crawled on. Nobody came into
the street. There was nothing to happen. It might have been an hour
before Dan Anderson leaned over, picked up a splinter to whittle, and
went on with his story, back of which I was long before this well
convinced there remained some topic concealed, albeit beneath
inconsequent and picturesque details.

"At that state of my _entwickelung_, as the French say, I still wore
my trousers with a strong crimp at the bottom and cut pear-shaped at
the hips. That pair was. The next one wasn't. It was a long, long
way to that next pair. I forgot how many years.

"You see, by that time--although I did still say 'rully,' account of
having roomed with a man who had been in Harvard for a while--I was
really beginning to wake up just a little bit. My dad still supposed I
was doing dog on the dramatic page in New York, whereas the facts wer