led. When you see your customers passing your
front door to try a new shop farther up the street, you want to sit down
and consider what's the matter, and devise means of regaining your lost
ground. It doesn't pay merely to ridicule the new man or cry that his
goods are inferior. Yours have got to be superior--or"--and the gray
eyes twinkled for the first time--"they must be dressed up to look
better in your show window."

Bassett rose and walked the length of the room, with his hands thrust
into his trousers pockets, and before he sat down he poured himself a
glass of water from the pitcher and drank it slowly, with an air of
preoccupation. He moved easily, with a quicker step than might have been
expected in one of his figure. The strength of his hand was also in the
firm line of his vigorous, well-knit frame. And his rather large head,
Dan observed, rested solidly on broad shoulders.

Harwood's thoughts were, however, given another turn at once. Morton
Bassett had said all he cared to say about politics and he now asked Dan
whether he was a college man, to which prompting the reporter recited
succinctly the annals of his life.

"You're a Harrison County boy, are you? So you didn't like the farm, and
found a way out? That's good. You may be interested in some of my
books."

Dan was immediately on guard against being bored; the library of even an
intelligent local statesman like Morton Bassett was hardly likely to
prove interesting. One of his earlier subjects had asked him
particularly to mention his library, which consisted mainly of
government reports.

"I've been a collector of Americana," Bassett remarked, throwing open
several cases. "I've gone in for colonial history, particularly, and
some of these things are pretty rare."

The shelves rose to the ceiling and Bassett produced a ladder that he
might hand down a few of the more interesting volumes for Dan's closer
inspection.

"Here's Wainwright's 'Brief Description of the Ohio River, With some
Account of the Savages Living Thereon'--published in London in 1732,
and there are only three copies in existence. This is Atterbury's
'Chronicle of the Chesapeake Settlements'--the best thing I have. The
author was an English sailor who joined the colonists in the Revolution
and published a little memoir of his adventures in America. The only
other copy of that known to exist is in the British Museum. I fished
mine out of a pile of junk in Baltimore about ten yea