ssure you."

Mrs. Lee then boldly said she had got from Mr. Carrington an idea that
Mrs.

Baker was a very skilful diplomatist.

"Diplomatist!" echoed the widow with her genial laugh; "Well! it was as
much that as anything, but there's not many diplomatists' wives in this
city ever did as much work as I used to do. Why, I knew half the members
of Congress intimately, and all of them by sight. I knew where they came
from and what they liked best. I could get round the greater part of
them, sooner or later."

Mrs. Lee asked what she did with all this knowledge. Mrs. Baker shook
her pink-and-white countenance, and almost paralysed her opposite
neighbour by a sort of Grande Duchesse wink:

"Oh, my dear! you are new here. If you had seen Washington in war-times
and for a few years afterwards, you wouldn't ask that. We had more
congressional business than all the other agents put together. Every one
came to us then, to get his bill through, or his appropriation watched.
We were hard at work all the time. You see, one can't keep the run of
three hundred men without some trouble. My husband used to make lists
of them in books with a history of each man and all he could learn about
him, but I carried it all in my head."

"Do you mean that you could get them all to vote as you pleased?" asked
Madeleine.

"Well! we got our bills through," replied Mrs. Baker.

"But how did you do it? did they take bribes?"

"Some of them did. Some of them liked suppers and cards and theatres
and all sorts of things. Some of them could be led, and some had to be
driven like Paddy's pig who thought he was going the other way. Some
of them had wives who could talk to them, and some--hadn't," said Mrs.
Baker, with a queer intonation in her abrupt ending.

"But surely," said Mrs. Lee, "many of them must have been above--I mean,
they must have had nothing to get hold of; so that you could manage
them."

Mrs. Baker laughed cheerfully and remarked that they were very much of a
muchness.

"But I can't understand how you did it," urged Madeleine; "now, how
would you have gone to work to get a respectable senator's vote--a man
like Mr. Ratcliffe, for instance?"

"Ratcliffe!" repeated Mrs. Baker with a slight elevation of voice that
gave way to a patronising laugh. "Oh, my dear! don't mention names.
I should get into trouble. Senator Ratcliffe was a good friend of my
husband's. I guess Mr. Carrington could have told you that. But you see,
wha