and, when a popular
candidate does succeed against their will, the Government officials
take good care to make his berth as uncomfortable as they can. These
are small questions of politics to ask you to follow, but they were our
great ones; and we were as ardent and excited and eager about the choice
of our little local Governor as though he wielded real power in a great
state.

"When I obtained the syndicate, my great ambition was to tread in the
footsteps of my father, old Gustave Gamerra, who had left behind him a
great name as the assertor of popular rights, and who had never bated
the very least privilege that pertained to his native village. I did my
best--not very discreetly, perhaps--for my own sake, but I held my head
high against all imperial and royal officials, and I taught them to
feel that there was at least one popular institution in the land that
no exercise of tyranny could assail. I was over-zealous about all our
rights. I raked up out of old archives traces of privileges that we once
possessed and had never formally surrendered; I discovered concessions
that had been made to as of which we had never reaped the profit; and I
was, so to say, ever at war with the authorities, who were frank enough
to say that when my two years of office expired they meant to give me
some wholesome lessons about obedience.

"They were as good as their word. I had no sooner descended to a private
station than I was made to feel all the severities of their displeasure.
They took away my license to sell salt and tobacco, and thereby fully
one half of my little income; they tried to withdraw my privilege to
sell wine, but this came from the municipality, and they could not touch
it. Upon information that they had suborned, they twice visited my house
to search for seditious papers, and, finally, they made me such a mark
of their enmity that the timid of the townsfolk were afraid to be seen
with me, and gradually dropped my acquaintance. This preyed upon me most
of all. I was all my life of a social habit; I delighted to gather my
friends around me, or to go and visit them, and to find myself, as I was
growing old, growing friendless too, was a great blow.

"I was a widower, and had none but an only daughter."

When he had reached thus far, his voice failed him, and, after an effort
or two, he could not continue, and turned away his head and buried it in
his hands. Full ten minutes elapsed before he resumed, which he did
w