antly, and contemplating it with a reverential surprise, and with the
awed sense of having trodden shod upon holy ground--

"They!" he said.

"Oh, indeed, yes, a many and a many a time."

He continued to gaze at the chair fascinated, magnetized; and for once in
his life that continental stretch of dry prairie which stood for his
imagination was afire, and across it was marching a slanting flamefront
that joined its wide horizons together and smothered the skies with
smoke. He was experiencing what one or another drowsing, geographically
ignorant alien experiences every day in the year when he turns a dull and
indifferent eye out of the car window and it falls upon a certain
station-sign which reads "Stratford-on-Avon!" Mrs. Sellers went
gossiping comfortably along:

"Oh, they like to hear him talk, especially if their load is getting
rather heavy on one shoulder and they want to shift it. He's all air,
you know,--breeze, you may say--and he freshens them up; it's a trip to
the country, they say. Many a time he's made General Grant laugh--and
that's a tidy job, I can tell you, and as for Sheridan, his eye lights up
and he listens to Mulberry Sellers the same as if he was artillery.
You see, the charm about Mulberry is, he is so catholic and unprejudiced
that he fits in anywhere and everywhere. It makes him powerful good
company, and as popular as scandal. You go to the White House when the
President's holding a general reception--sometime when Mulberry's there.
Why, dear me, you can't tell which of them it is that's holding that
reception."

"Well, he certainly is a remarkable man--and he always was. Is he
religious?"

"Clear to his marrow--does more thinking and reading on that subject than
any other except Russia and Siberia: thrashes around over the whole
field, too; nothing bigoted about him."

"What is his religion?"

"He--" She stopped, and was lost for a moment or two in thinking, then
she said, with simplicity, "I think he was a Mohammedan or something last
week."

Washington started down town, now, to bring his trunk, for the hospitable
Sellerses would listen to no excuses; their house must be his home during
the session. The Colonel returned presently and resumed work upon his
plaything. It was finished when Washington got back.

"There it is," said the Colonel, "all finished."

"What is it for, Colonel?"

"Oh, it's just a trifle. Toy to amuse the children."

Washington examined it.