colate, thereby
joining issue for the first time with my manager on the subject of
methods. Nick was in favor of champagne, on the score that the Spinney
Guards had been regaled with beer and sherry, but my darling declared
that even if it were the turning-point of the election, she would not
consent to win votes by playing Hebe to beardless youths. A political
aspirant who is forced to decide between his manager and his wife has
need of all the philosophy at his command.

To atone for this obduracy, Josephine had a pleasant little surprise
ready in the shape of a basket of silken badges emblematic chiefly of
myself, and more remotely of the Presidential candidate and our party
principles. She and her daughters, despite my blushes, fastened these
one by one to the blue blouses of the members of the Fourth District
Reform Cadets after everything to eat and drink in the house had
vanished. Not only then, but henceforth until the end of the campaign,
it was embarrassing to me to note how subordinate a position every
other candidate held in Josephine's regard. One would have supposed
that I was the party nominee for the chief magistracy of the nation,
instead of the leader of a forlorn contest for a congressional seat in
a hopelessly Republican district. On the occasion of the torchlight
parade two miles long, whereby the enemy sought to carry the city by
storm, and which passed close to our front door, our house was as dark
as Erebus. Josephine insisted even that the lights in the front hall
and in the basement should be extinguished, and she drew the
drawing-room curtains over the window-shades so that we need not seem
to furnish our foes with one pale ray of comfort. Induced by curiosity
to peep out at the passing show, she limited her strictures to scornful
but tranquil denunciation of the campaign rhetoric blazoned on the
transparencies, until the Spinney Guards arrived, headed by a
magnificent mulatto bearing a delineation of the Reform Candidate
submerged in a huge soup-tureen with an appropriate tag beneath. For
an instant she stared, then she gasped as though some one had struck
her, and she fiercely started to raise the window.

"What are you trying to do, Josephine?"

"Let me go, Fred. I will, I will. How dare they?"

"Pooh, dear! All is fair in politics. It's no worse than the Swamp of
Civil Service Reform," I said, as I tore away her vindictive grasp from
the window which she had succeeded in o