rom those States through which it ran might be
selected and controlled.

Senator Hanway and the President and General Attorney departed in high
good feeling to meet with those statesmen named, while Richard sought
Bess to hear word of his Dorothy and receive that letter which was
already the particular ray of sunshine in days which were cloudy and
dark.

It would do mankind no service to break in at this place with wideflung
descriptions of Mr. Gwynn's dinner. It is among things strange that the
world in the matter of proposing a candidate for public favor or
celebrating a victory has made little or no advance from earliest ages.
It has been immemorial custom when one had a candidate on his hands and
desired to obtain for him the countenance of men, to give a dinner for
those who were reckoned leaders of sentiment and, first filling them
with meat and wine, make them stirring speeches to bring them to the
candidate's support. From the initial dinner sub-dinners would radiate,
and others be born of these, until a whole population might be
considered fed and filled with food and speeches, and the candidate
dined, not to say dinned, into the popular heart, or, what is the same
thing, the popular stomach--in either case the popular regard. In
celebrations the procedure was equally archaic. Did some admiral win a
sea fight or some general a land fight or some candidate a ballot fight,
instantly one-half the population marched in the middle of the street
while the other half banked the curbs in screaming, kerchief-waving
lines of admiration. And thus has it ever been since that far-distant
morning of Eternity, when Time with his scythe let down the bars and
went upon his mowing of the meadows of men's existences. Mr. Gwynn, you
may be sure, has nothing novel to propose; wherefore at this crisis he
gives a dinner, as doubtless did Nero and Moses and Noah and Adam and
others of the mighty dead on similar occasions in their day.

Mr. Gwynn's dinner began with Senator Gruff. This wise man, with the
sanction of Senator Hanway, intimated to Richard the uses of such a
festival. Mr. Gwynn was not in politics; his dinner table would be
neutral ground. When therefore some fiery orator, carefully primed and
cocked, suddenly exploded into eloquent demands that Senator Hanway
offer himself for the White House, subject of course, as the phrase is,
to the action of his party's convention thereafter to assemble, it would
have a look of sp